Absolute King shit.

The news of King Charles' cancer diagnosis has supercharged the papers' parasocial relationship with a man who hates them.

Previously: “A perfectly normal girl.”

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The royal reporters insist that King Charles has “raised awareness”. I agree but not on what he’s raised awareness about. I’m fairly sure that most people were well aware of cancer — 50% of us will develop some form of it in our lifetimes — and the abysmal waiting times for treatment. The King has raised awareness, as he does daily through his mere existence, of the yawning chasm of inequality at the heart of British life. He entered this world via a magic vagina which conveyed upon him a specialness that he has never had to prove and which has been garnished throughout his life with titles, medals, and all sorts of golden geegaws.

As they were for his mother, Charles experiences hospitals as places that smell perpetually of fresh paint, where he’s swept straight through to the best possible physicians, where waiting lists are no more tangible a concept than a unicorn tap dancing to the sound of a reanimated Jeffrey Epstein rapping all of Prince Andrew’s alleged crimes on a little stage in the corner of the Woking branch of Pizza Express.

But a fairytale institution — extra grim edition — gets fairytale coverage in the British media, so readers are assumed to be universally worried about their beloved King and not enraged that while their friends and relatives wait for care, Charlie’s helicoptering to appointments while columnists assure us that his body is literally the body politic. At The Daily Telegraph, Allison Pearson, the Lidl middle aisle Leni Riefenstahl, writes:

The Queen was never ill, or never let on that she was, so we believed that she was immortal. Now that she’s gone, the whole clan seems to be dropping like flies.

There’s the columnists’ ‘we’ in action: ‘We’ believed the Queen was “immortal”, did ‘we’, Allison? That you gobble down royal propaganda like the obsequious orphan in the workhouse, just so damn grateful for your gruel, does not mean your opinion is representative of the rest of us. If “whole clan seems to be dropping like flies”, it’s because monarchy is a senescent institution both literally and figuratively; the King is an old man and his heir is ageing like the portrait in Dorian Grey’s attic.

The headline slapped on Pearson’s piece by one of the skeleton crew of Telegraph subs that remain in that haunted, paranoid pirate ship is pulled straight from the ‘stating the bleeding obvious’ category: The King and Queen are clearly not invincible. It’s time for Princess Anne to shine. There I was thinking that Charles and Camilla could have their brains transplanted into some kind of monarchist mech suit to reign over us for a thousand years, powered by the sacrifice of one thousand souls a week to their infernal machinery. Perhaps the ‘shining’ Princess Anne is the one with access to that dark magic given that she is also in her seventies.

Pearson’s fan fiction continues:

The secret weapon here is surely Princess Anne. Privately, many of us think that the country would do rather well if we had only female monarchs. We’re very good at Queens, you know. The Princess Royal succeeded by the knockout Princess Charlotte, a natural star like her Granny Diana, would be perfect, I think.  

Nothing says ‘this is a private thought’ like using it as the hook for your column in a national newspaper. Of course, this being Allison Pearson, it only gets weirder:

… is no reason why Anne cannot play a hugely prominent role while the King is having treatment. At the Coronation, the Princess Royal was magnificent in swishing green velvet robes and a black bicorn hat with a red plume. She looked like a wizard who could put the whole place under her spell. Also, either by luck or cunning design, the red plume on Anne’s hat almost entirely obscured the ginger traitor in the pew behind. What a service she did to the nation!

Pearson’s weird love for a horsey posh woman she doesn’t know is nothing compared to her panto hatred for a man she’s never met but who has helped her fill thousands of column inches. In Pearson world, '“the ginger traitor” — Prince Harry — is also in the frame for the death of his grandfather…

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex showed a merciless (and mercenary) disregard for the health of Prince Philip who was very unwell in the same private London hospital his eldest son now attends, when they gave their notorious interview to Oprah in March 2021. A month later, the Windsor patriarch was dead at the age of 99.

… and his wife, Meghan, isn’t a wonderful wizard like awesome Anne but some kind of malevolent sex witch:

I do hope the rumour is true that the marvellously acerbic Prince Philip referred to Meghan as DoW – the Duchess of Windsor – after her malevolent American predecessor who also had an unfortunate power over the loins of a British prince. 

That might have been the most cringeworthy paragraph in the column had Pearson not upped the ante with her conclusion:

Since her mother’s death, Princess Anne hasn’t put a foot wrong. In her looks, in her voice, and especially on horseback, she is the best living reminder we have of Elizabeth II. Undoubtedly, she has everything it takes to take the strain of the Crown awhile till the man who regards her so highly is well enough to pick it up again. He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother. 

That’s all you need to convince Pearson that you’re born to rule — a posh voice, a big hat, a fancy coat, and a horse to hand.

In other unsurprising news, GB News went even further with Mike Parry, the former broadcasting partner of Mike ‘concrete grower’ Graham, suggesting that Harry is responsible for his father’s cancer:

Could the stress of having to sort out the Harry situation over the last two years have contributed to his illness? Because we know that stress does contribute to illness. Stress can give you heart attacks, stress can give you nervous conditions, and I believe that if you ask top doctors they’ll say yes, it could be responsible for at least enhancing the King’s anxiety and that anxiety in itself might have worked its way physically into his body.

After he Dan Wootton/Lawrence Fox farrago last year, it’s not surprising that the hosts (mildly) pushed back against Parry’s poisonous rhetoric. However, elsewhere on the channel, Kelvin MacKenzie was parachuted in to rail against republicans for expecting any level of equality when it comes to cancer care.

While Pearson and Parry competed to be most unpleasant, there was a sycophancy showdown between the Joneses — Dylan Jones in The Evening Standard and Liz Jones in The Daily Mail. Jones of the Standard, who has previously managed to squeeze pieces for GQ, The Times, and The Daily Telegraph out of two encounters in 2018 with the then-Prince of Wales, blew the dust off his anecdotes again:

… Charles and Camilla were both good with the press, encouraging access in a way few of their predecessors had. When you did as much as them, it was a good idea to have people around to report it. While some liked to cast Charles’ entire life as a prelude (he was, at the time, the world’s oldest intern), in truth he had lived a life as rich as any king. He had certainly worked as hard. The pack (for a major international ambassadorial trip the press corps could be 70 strong, but on this tour, there were only 20 of us) liked to say the couple ran on Duracell, which, like most things they said about them, was meant affectionately.

If Jones, now editor-in-chief of the Standard, had filed by hand, the subs would have had to scrape the spittle off his copy. Jones honed his name-dropping skills to frankly frightening levels during his 22 year reign as the editor of GQ and his column includes a rare double-drop in its most cringeworthy section:

When doing his rounds, Charles had a spontaneous laugh, not unlike the one employed by Keith Richards. Now and then, Richards laughed for no apparent reason, almost as if the ridiculousness of his life had just occurred to him, wheezing and giggling at the preposterous nature of his good fortune. HRH’s face would occasionally explode into paroxysms of good-natured gurning, in the way it probably did 50 years ago when he mucked about with Spike Milligan and the rest of the Goons. It would be easy to assume that the laughs were designed to convince people he was having a good time and yet it looked to me like a double bluff, with the laughs disguising the fact that he actually was having a good time.

That circuitous sentence at the end is a sure fire sign of someone who’s become very accustomed to not having a word of their copy edited and improved.

Meanwhile, Jones of the Mail followed the house style by making someone else’s ill health all about her. Under the headline Charles, we need you to be OK so that we're OK. We're not ready for William yet ... she simpers:

Charles had always been there, throughout my life. A bit like wallpaper. I was too young to appreciate his so-called playboy years, and by the time he got to Diana, well, I was with her all the way.

… My opinion failed to change until he became King. Even the leaky pen petulance didn’t dent his new image: it just made him more human.

Far be it from me to suggest that Liz has shifted her opinion because she exists only to echo the Mail’s editorial line in the most febrile and unhinged way possible. Just like Pearson, Jones deals with a complete absence of personal knowledge or insight by analysing the King’s appearance and ‘the vibes’:

His features seemed softer, less anxious. Not gleeful to at last be doing a ‘proper’ job, but more at ease in his own skin. I even warmed to Camilla: slightly cartoonish in her crown at the coronation, but that made her one of us, approachable.

… Then the news the King has cancer. If cancer can strike him, what hope the rest of us?

Does Jones believe the King’s touch can cure scrofula?

It turns out this unremarkable 75-year-old man is as subject to the iniquities of ageing as any other 75-year-old man. But, she howls, what about his love of linseed and fruit on his breakfast, the fact he skips lunch, and his occasional avoidance of meat, fish, and dairy “for goodness’ sake”? He even walks a bit! This should surely have made him invulnerable to the treasonous actions of abnormal cells that refuse to wave teeny tiny union flags.

Jones dismisses those who think the King should join the NHS waiting list — hi, Liz! — as “haters on social media” because…

Charles is different. He didn’t choose to be sovereign. He knows we need him to be OK so that we are OK. We are quite done with change, thank you very much.

There’s the columnists’ ‘we’ again. I don’t need him to be okay. I don’t care any more than I would care about any stranger’s illnesses or misfortunes. In fact, having been forced for the entirety of my life to hear about this family of fortunate nobodies, I honestly care less. I don’t wish cancer on him but, to steal from The Smiths, he and his relatives say nothing to me about my life.

When Jones writes…

No offence, but none of us is quite ready for William. I want to see Kate flying like a kite again, for years, not caged and burdened. We need someone sage, stable. I’ll say it again: We don’t need any more change.

I was just starting to enjoy Charles and Camilla, creaking but cracking on. For the first time, I can describe them both as ‘sweet’.

The Queen is the sort of good egg you want at a time of crisis: not hysterical, but matter of fact, a bit brisk, always seeing the funny side. She’s a pin to his balloon and he loves her for it.

… it is like overhearing someone talking about a bad soap opera with characters that I’ve never taken to but for which we’re all obliged to pay.

The press accepted and colluded with the decades-long PR campaign to turn Camilla from ‘home-wrecker’ to homely and honest Queen, and switched from sneering at Charles as Prince of Wales to lauding him as King. His illness provides another chance to pretend that the public as a whole is as obsessed with the wearying Windsors as ageing and declining newspaper audiences are.

Still, I wish the King a swift recovery, if only to stave off another wave of souvenir supplements and crocodile columnists’ tears.

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