King Charles is currently on his summer holiday in Balmoral. After the stresses and difficulties of the past few months – which have included a reconciliation not only with Prince Harry and his grandchildren but also with Meghan Markle – he is surely entitled to a few weeks of privacy and relaxation. Yet, against this backdrop, the monarch is still suffering from the undisclosed form of cancer that he was diagnosed with in early 2024.
While the mood music has been broadly positive when it comes to treating the King’s illness, there has been no announcement that he is in remission or if the cancer has been cured altogether. This suggests that this continues to be a strain both on himself and those around him.
The extent to which this has caused personal ructions – as cancer does in any family – has been made clear by a candid new interview that Queen Camilla has given to the chief executive of the cancer charity Maggie’s, Dame Laura Lee. She has served as president of the organisation since 2008 and is now marking its 30th anniversary.
No one would expect a running commentary from Charles or Camilla or from royal courtiers
During the course of the minute-long film, Lee talked about ‘the amount of people that have come in because of the King being so open because of his own diagnosis and having a productive life’. The Queen spoke affectingly and apparently openly about her husband’s bloody-minded attitude towards his illness, saying, ‘Nothing stopped him…he just said, “this is my way, I’m going to cope with it”’.
The implication, of course, is that illness is a great leveller. Admittedly, though, if you’re the King, you have access to round-the-clock medical treatment and the finest doctors in the country, which is not something that is available to the majority of his subjects.
Camilla also reveals that she faced a difficult dilemma when she opened a Maggie’s cancer support centre just before her husband’s illness was made public in February 2024. She told Lee:
Nobody could say anything at the time. That was quite difficult. I almost said something but, you know, I felt that it wasn’t the time to say. [I] looked at everybody who was suffering and all the relations and I think it made me realise even more how important these places were. I was just longing to let it out but obviously I couldn’t.
The personal impact on Camilla, as well as everyone else around the King, has clearly been a significant one, and the interview leans heavily on her personal accessibility. She says of her association with Maggie’s that:
Suddenly your husband is diagnosed and you think goodness, you’ve been talking to all these people and I’m the one with some relation who’s got to help to look after my poor husband and try to understand it all.
One can only hope that Camilla and Charles manage to have a relaxing and enjoyable break, away from the stresses and difficulties of both public and family life, and that the film for Maggie’s has the desired effect of raising awareness.
Still, for all its undoubted good intentions, it is hard not to feel that there remains a lack of transparency when it comes to the King’s condition. We still have no idea which kind of cancer he is suffering from – prostate, the most common condition in men of his age, has been ruled out. Details on his health have been sketchy, with more concerning updates (such as his temporary hospitalisation last year) being offered grudgingly, if at all.
Of course, cancer is a cruel and devastating condition that sees many suffering from it prefer not to make every detail of treatment public. Neither would anybody expect a running commentary, either from Charles or Camilla or from royal courtiers. Yet even those who are instinctively sympathetic towards the King – which must be most of the country, barring some particularly depraved republicans and nihilists – could be forgiven for thinking that the treatment of the illness is being carefully angled towards the most positive headlines.
Cancer is no respecter of person and no respecter of PR spin. Camilla’s comments are both welcome and timely, but perhaps it is time for more details offered about the King’s condition, and an explanation of whether, two and a half years after the initial diagnosis, the long term prognosis is an encouraging one or not. Then, and only then, can the monarch’s subjects truly feel that we are all in it together, rather than being fed a cherry-picked version of the truth.
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