Great Britain’s queen is a year dead and her son is passing his first anniversary on the throne. What has astonished his subjects, and maybe disappointed royal-watching bloggers around the world, is how pleasantly uneventful and indeed dull Charles III’s reign has turned out to be.
There have been no public tantrums from the man himself, though I hear informed reports of a few private ones. For decades, as Prince of Wales, the king plowed his own furrow, sometimes with chaotic consequences, especially when he sought to interfere in political issues. This became most serious and threatening to his personal credibility when some 15 years ago he pushed government ministers to divert taxpayers’ money from the National Health Service into homeopathic medicine, one of his pet enthusiasms.
Surgeons and doctors protested furiously, publicly and surely rightly, that every pound apportioned to what they characterized as quack remedies was diverted from scientifically proven treatments. Many of us dreaded the consequences if, once crowned, he persisted with such campaigning.