Isla Campbell on the King’s Public Programme, His Cancer Recovery, and the Specific Challenges of Being the Monarchy’s Chief Executive Officer
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Isla Campbell | Crown and Clown UK
King Charles III is 75 years old, is recovering from a cancer diagnosis that he disclosed publicly in February 2024, is managing a public programme that takes him from New York to Warsaw to Balmoral within the space of weeks, and is doing all of this with the specific energy of a man who waited 73 years for the job and has decided that limited time and uncertain health are not reasons to do it at half-pace. Whether this is inspiring or alarming depends on your view of what a constitutional monarchy is for and what its chief symbolic officer should optimise for. I have covered enough of his public duties to have developed a clear view on this, which I will share after the necessary context.
The Cancer Disclosure and Its Significance
When Buckingham Palace announced in February 2024 that the King had been diagnosed with cancer — a form not publicly specified at the time, though prostate issues requiring separate treatment had also been confirmed — the disclosure was remarkable in its directness. Previous monarchs did not routinely disclose serious health diagnoses to the public; the Palace’s communications on royal health have historically been characterised by the studied vagueness of institutions that believe opacity is dignity. The decision to be direct about the cancer, to acknowledge that treatment was underway, and to provide periodic updates on the King’s progress represented a deliberate choice about transparency that reflects the current reign’s approach to the monarchy’s public role.
The decision was also strategically sound. A monarch who demonstrates that serious illness does not require institutional concealment, that the show goes on while treatment continues, and that public duty can be maintained alongside private health challenge is demonstrating a form of resilience that is appropriate to the institution’s symbolic role. The alternative — concealment followed by discovery — would have been worse in every dimension. The disclosure was right. The King had it right. His public programme has continued, with modifications, throughout treatment and recovery. He went to New York. He will go elsewhere. The cancer does not appear to have altered his fundamental approach to the job.
The New York Visit in Context
The New York visit — which included the 9/11 memorial ceremony, the co-chairing of the Hormuz Summit with Prime Minister Starmer, and the Mamdani diamond moment — represents the King at his most useful to the British state: visible international engagement on matters of genuine strategic significance, wrapped in the ceremonial attention that the monarchy attracts and that elected politicians, however capable, do not generate at the same level. The Hormuz Summit, which produced a joint Macron-Starmer statement on maritime security and freedom of navigation, required a context that elevated it above the level of a routine bilateral meeting. The King’s presence at the associated events provided that context. This is the monarchy’s value proposition at the international level: not policy but platform, not decision but setting, not substance but the scale of attention that substance requires to be heard.
Whether the platform justifies the institution’s cost is a debate that I will not resolve in this column, having failed to resolve it in previous columns and being reasonably confident that it will remain unresolved in subsequent ones. What I can observe is that the current King is using the platform energetically and with apparent strategic purpose, which is better than the alternative.
The Family Dimension
No account of the King’s current position is complete without acknowledging the family dimension, which is the aspect of the job that is simultaneously the most human and the most institutionally complicated. The relationship with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex — strained since 2020 and the subject of books, documentaries, legal proceedings, and the most sustained family-related monarchy coverage since the 1990s — has not publicly resolved. The Prince and Princess of Wales are executing their own royal programme with increasing confidence and public favour. The family is, as families tend to be, more complex than the ceremonial surface suggests, and the King is managing its complexity alongside everything else that the job requires.
According to the Royal Family’s official website, the King’s schedule for May includes multiple domestic and international engagements. The schedule does not address family dynamics, which is appropriate, because family dynamics are not the schedule’s job. The schedule is the public work. The family dynamics are the private reality. The King is managing both at 75, following a cancer diagnosis, in the first full years of a reign that arrived later than almost anyone expected. The word for this, I think, is persistence. The monarchy has it in abundance. So, apparently, does Charles III.
Isla Campbell covers the Royal Family from Central London. Her homepage is at The London Prat.
For more royal coverage, visit Private Eye.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
The Succession Horizon
The question that follows any discussion of the King’s health is the succession question, which the institution manages with appropriate discretion and which the public discussion handles with varying degrees of that discretion. The Prince of Wales is the heir. He is 43, healthy, and has been preparing for the role that he will eventually assume since the moment his mother became Queen in 1952, before he was born, and which has shaped his entire life in ways that are both evident in his preparation and unknowable in their personal weight. The Princess of Wales, who has also managed a cancer diagnosis in 2024 with notable composure and public communication, has returned to full public duties and is building an independent programme focused on early childhood development that is accumulating evidence of genuine policy impact. The next reign, whenever it comes, will have its own character, its own priorities, and its own relationship with the public that the current generation of royals is in the process of establishing. What is already visible is that it will be conducted by two people who have thought seriously about what they want it to be and who are preparing for it without waiting for the starting gun. This is good institutional health, which is a different category from individual health and which the monarchy currently possesses in encouraging measure.
