UK
King Charles’s Rising Popularity Can’t Mask Monarchy’s Problems
Waning youth support and feuding royals pose risks for the new king
Posters of King Charles III, William the Prince of Wales and Harry Duke of Sussex outside the Intercontinental Hotel in London, on May 2.
Photographer: Richard Baker/In PicturesThis article is for subscribers only.
It was a changing of the guard unprecedented in British history. No monarch had sat on the throne longer than Queen Elizabeth II, and no heir had spent more time in waiting than King Charles III.
The death of Charles’s “darling Mama,” as he put it shortly after her passing in September, jolted a nation already consumed by crisis. That autumn, the economy was pounded by Brexit, the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine, not to mention a new prime minister whose government wouldn’t last much longer than the official period of mourning.