When the King delivered this year’s traditional Christmas Day speech – the fourth he has now given – he chose to break with convention by delivering it not from the usual surroundings of Buckingham Palace, but from the Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey. It is unfortunate, then, that it is royal-adjacent ladies of quite another kind who are presently on the public’s mind, thanks to the recent revelations that Charles’s younger brother supposedly implored Ghislaine Maxwell to find him ‘new inappropriate friends’ in August 2001: the latest in a series of embarrassing and damaging revelations about the former Prince Andrew’s behaviour that resulted in his being stripped of his royal titles and standing in October.
While the King’s Christmas address is a personal and heartfelt message, there are always deep-seated expectations as to what he will and will not include. And so it proved this year. Andrew and Harry were very much off the table for discussion, but so, perhaps more surprisingly, was any discussion of his health. Many might find that the recent statement that he made on Channel 4 was more personal and revealing – as I anticipated it might be at the time – than this articulate but strangely rote recital of this year’s royal greatest hits, or what passes for them, anyway.
Quite literally played in with his usual theme tune of the National Anthem, with full brass accompaniment, Charles, looking tired, talked of praying with the pope and of pilgrimage – ‘a word less used today’ – and of how the significance of journeying into the future and past alike is crucial. He talked of the anniversaries of VE and VJ Day, and of how ‘the courage and sacrifice of our servicemen and women…carry a timeless message for us all…these are the values that have shaped our country and the Commonwealth’. It was affecting, and erudite, but many viewers might wonder whether he wanted to say something more personal, but perhaps this is not the time.
There was a certain blandness to how he talked of how we should think of the young who have died in the service of our country – it is not a problem that any of the royal family, save the licentious Duke of Kent, have faced in recent times – but when he referred to the Christmas story, and the journey of the shepherds and the Magi, the King was on firmer ground, something that he later returned to when he talked of ‘inner strength’. The allusion to ‘all the great faiths’ may have bothered some, and the idea of ‘peace through forgiveness’ and ‘creating new friendships’, to say nothing of how much we have in common with different faiths, will do little to endear him to those who see him as the woke monarch, any more than his praise of “the great diversity of our communities.
The King thinks of himself as an intellectual, albeit without a great deal of competition in his family – hence his allusion to TS Eliot’s line ‘at the still point of the turning world’ but even as he suggested, without a great deal of evidence, that ‘right triumphs over wrong’ and how ‘we seem to cherish the values of compassion and reconciliation’, it felt like the wrong speech for the wrong time.
I thought that 2024 – a year in which both the King and the Princess of Wales were diagnosed with cancer, and in which the continuing antics of Princes Andrew and Harry posed an existential embarrassment to the institution of the monarchy – was another annus horribilis for the royal family, but that 2025 could surely only get better. It has not proved to be the case, with the furore around Andrew’s banishment being described, with some hyperbole, as the biggest threat to the Firm since the abdication crisis of 1936. Even a brief reconciliation between father and son was swiftly undone by the latter leaking details of their meeting, despite specifically being asked not to as a condition of the rapprochement taking place. Many will now hope that 2026 – a year in which Charles’s cancer treatment is said to be lessening in intensity – will be a better 12 months for the monarchy. And let us hope that next year’s King’s speech is a rather better, less cagey one, too.
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