The scrutiny and speculation will be intense. Is he well enough to keep working? Who steps in and when? We have crossed a line
The British are not used to having a sick monarch. The whole point of the institution is to convey an image of resilience and invulnerability and to be seen in public, so King Charles’s decision to announce his cancer diagnosis publicly is to be commended for its commitment to openness. Early indications from Buckingham Palace, doctors and Downing Street are that there is nothing to worry about and, as Rishi Sunak let slip this morning, the disease, whatever it is, has been caught early. The king is, after all, 75 years old, active and fit on two meals a day, but he is of an age when many men receive such a diagnosis.
The speculation will start now. It is 72 years to the day since a shocked and deferential British public woke up to the news that Charles’s grandfather George VI had died in his sleep. Not even the king had apparently been told that, after a lifetime of heavy smoking, he had lung cancer – though perhaps the fact that his left lung had been removed in an operation at Buckingham Palace four and a half months earlier might have given him a bit of a clue. Those in the know, like the then prime minister, Winston Churchill, knew better, but no one else did, despite his haggard appearance. It could barely be disguised with makeup when he saw his daughter Princess Elizabeth off on a foreign tour from Heathrow a week before his death, the official cause of which was given as coronary thrombosis.
Stephen Bates, a former Guardian correspondent, is the author of Royalty Inc: Britain’s Best-known Brand and The Shortest History of the Crown.