By Shachi Kurl, President
March 15, 2024 – Just 18 months after the death of Queen Elizabeth, are the wheels coming off the royal carriage? Suffice to say, 2024 is off to a most displeasing start for this new Carolean era, led by King Charles the Third.
To recap: the “slimmed-down” House of Windsor, with only 11 working royals (half of them well past both British and Canadian traditional retirement age) was rocked by the twin announcements mid-January that the King himself, and Catherine, Princess of Wales (Kate Middleton to most of us), would be temporarily out of commission for health reasons. Charles, for an enlarged prostate. Catherine, for unspecified abdominal surgery. Oh, and in supporting his wife, another senior-most royal, Prince William, would also be off the job.
The communications approaches of each royal could not have differed more: Charles, far more transparent about what was ailing him, including a subsequent announcement that his prostate treatment had also revealed a form of cancer (although Buckingham Palace could not quite bring itself to tell us what kind, or what stage.) Since then, he’s been seen several times, reading get-well cards, meeting with cabinet ministers and basically, well, kinging.
By contrast, the Waleses decided that it’s none of our royal business what’s going on with the woman who will be Queen. The speculation that has followed this vacuum of information has lurched from the sublime to the ridiculous to the salacious and ultimately humiliating.
Read more from the article in the Ottawa Citizen here.
Image Credit – Photo by Hulki Okan Tabak on Unsplash