Buckingham Palace has managed to thread a particularly delicate needle over the course of 2024. They announced King Charles’s cancer in February, just after his hospitalization for a prostate procedure. They never confirmed what kind of cancer he has, although it’s widely rumored to be bladder cancer. They’ve never hidden the fact that Charles has to be in London mid-week, every week, for his cancer treatment, but they have never made it sound like anything more than a necessary addition to his already-busy schedule. They even sent him to France, Australia and Samoa this year and he managed to get through all of it. I even think his color has improved in recent weeks, despite the near-constant briefings from Kensington Palace that Charles is at death’s door. All in all, BP has managed this year pretty well, from what I can see. And they’ll have to do the same next year, because Charles’s cancer treatments will still be ongoing in 2025.
King Charles will continue to need cancer treatment in 2025, it was revealed today. A Buckingham Palace source has said the 76-year-old’s health is still being ‘managed’ but is ‘moving in a positive direction’.
His Majesty intends to return to a full programme of public duties next year. This will include ‘exciting’ UK and international visits in the first half of 2025, the insider said.
‘His treatment has been moving in a positive direction, as a managed condition the treatment cycle will continue into the new year’, the Palace source said.
Charles hosted members of the Royal Family at Buckingham Palace for a pre-Christmas lunch yesterday. Today the King and Queen will hold their last public event of the year as they attend a reception at Waltham Forest Town Hall in East London. Royal aides said this would ‘celebrate the strong sense of community cohesion in the borough, highlighted by peaceful counter-protests in August 2024 following disorder in other parts of the UK’.
Charles has increased his engagements recently, including a visit to Apple’s London HQ and a meeting with CEO Tim Cook.
‘You could almost forget at the start of the year this was a man that faced the shock of being diagnosed with cancer’, a source said to Sky News.
Next year, the big tell on Charles’s health will be the travel plans. He’s managed his schedule in the second half of this year, to the point where he’s being seen publicly on a weekly basis and he’s managing his “duties.” But if his weekly treatments continue well into 2025, I doubt that he and Camilla will actually travel at all. Camilla got knocked on her ass during and after the Australian trip and she clearly does not want to travel anymore. Charles clearly wants to travel more, but his doctors and courtiers might tell him that he simply can’t do it anymore. I also wonder if there will be pressure, as the one-year-mark on his cancer diagnosis comes up, to actually speak about what kind of cancer he has and what his treatments entail.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
