“Woke Royals”

The death of Queen Elizabeth has prompted an outpouring of grief and widespread praise for her 70 years of service as sovereign. But a few dissenting voices have begun to emerge from those who believe the monarchy is outdated and anti-democratic.

Within hours of King Charles being officially proclaimed monarch at a ceremony in London on Saturday, the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda announced plans for a referendum on whether the islands should keep the monarch as head of state. On Friday, politicians in Australia issued calls for that country to become a republic as soon as possible, and petition has started circulating in Wales to stop the use of the title “Prince of Wales.”

With sincere apologies to his beloved late mother, King Charles III is going to be a hard sell.

Elizabeth II was my Queen. She was the steadfast, elegant, dignified grandmother of our lives who earned our respect, and admiration, and for many of us, our love. A symbol of leadership and selflessness, she held herself silently above politics and never let slip her personal foibles.

By all means we should give him a chance but I suspect the die is cast and King Climate Scold will alienate and anger.

King Charles ‘told’ Prince Harry not to bring wife Meghan Markle to Balmoral Castle as he and other senior royals rushed to the beside of the dying Queen, it was reported last night.

Amid the personal family tragedy on Thursday, when the Queen died at the age of 96, a small domestic drama was playing out involving the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

King Charles has passionate views on everything from organic farming to climate change, education to modernist architecture — and for years the monarch has refused to keep them to himself.

Ignoring protocol that requires the British royal family to remain neutral, the heir to the throne was previously dubbed “the meddling prince” for making his views known to elected officials in Britain, and opining on world events.

He is tone deaf, I predict a rocky reign.

Queen Elizabeth death: What’s next for Canada’s 10 days of mourning

Queen Elizabeth II’s long life is over.

Now, Britain’s new monarch, King Charles III, faces two immediate challenges: first, to comfort and reassure a grieving nation even as he mourns the loss of his own mother, and second, to show he can abandon his former penchant for political interventions.

This second point bears special note. After all, the first responsibility of a British monarch is to serve as chief officer of that nation’s unwritten constitution — and not, that is to say, as a privileged voice for particular politics or social preferences.

The new monarch is keenly aware of protocol but will not abandon the causes close to his heart

The Queen is dead: long live the King. The prince who has been waiting for the crown longer than any royal heir in British history has now acceded to the throne, and soon we will have the answer to the question that has been asked so many times: what sort of king will Charles be? Will he be a meddling monarch, or one who changes our fundamental understanding of what it is to be a modern sovereign?

For Charles the fact that he has been preparing for this moment for the whole of his adult life paradoxically makes the challenges he faces harder, not easier. The overwhelming majority of people have only ever known one sovereign. The Queen’s style, manner, and general approach to the discharging of her responsibilities have become so imprinted on the national consciousness that, to many of us, they are synonymous with what it is to be the monarch.

Her speech about gender equality was entirely about herself.

The Duchess of Sussex’s speech yesterday at the One Young World summit, a charity shebang for ‘young leaders’, had been billed as a talk on gender equality. But what the 2,000-or-so young delegates heard in Manchester yesterday was something rather different.

In the course of her seven-minute monologue, Meghan Markle mentioned gender equality just once – through a blink-and-you’d-miss-it anecdote about the bravery of a young woman from Eritrea. For the rest of Meghan’s time at the podium, she focused on her favourite subject: herself.

When the Duke and Duchess of Sussex sealed the deal with the Queen for liberation from royal life in January 2020, their statement pledged that “everything they do will continue to uphold the values of Her Majesty”.

How distant that promise seems now, as the Balmoral breakfast table heaves with headlines featuring slings and arrows so frequently fired by the Sussexes at the monarch’s family and the institution she leads. But the Queen, 96, has been keeping calm and carrying on during her annual Scottish break. “She has had a busy summer with lots of visitors and has been out picnicking,” says a Palace source.

Last week, I wrote that I felt increasingly sorry for Harry and his walk-on role in his wife’s never-ending psychodrama. I switched off my computer thinking: enough about the Sussexes!

Yet Meghan’s 6,400-word interview with New York fashion website The Cut this week means I have no choice but to revisit the subject — and Meghan’s strange relationship with the truth.

The Queen famously said ‘recollections may vary’ when it came to Megs’s extraordinary charges of cruelty and racism against the Royal Family. Yet it’s the recollections of those outside the royal fold that are now calling the Duchess to account.

We’ve all spent months bracing ourselves for what our leaders assure us will be a dreadful winter. As the weather turns, we can look forward to ruinous energy bills, runaway inflation, collapsing health services, strikes, blackouts, more strikes, violent crime, and perhaps even – why not? – a nuclear war with Russia.

As if that weren’t bad enough, Meghan and Harry are back, wafting over all the way from Montecito, California on billowy clouds of bonkers publicity, self-pity and self-help mumbo-jumbo.

Meghan Markle today issued a new attack on the Royal Family, saying that she and Prince Harry were ‘happy’ to leave Britain and were ‘upsetting the dynamic of the hierarchy… just by existing’ before they quit as senior royals.

The Duchess of Sussex has given a bombshell interview to The Cut – part of New York magazine – in which she claimed that what the couple asked for when they wanted financial freedom was not ‘reinventing the wheel’.

The article also heard from Harry who suggested some members of the Royal Family ‘aren’t able to work and live together’, while Meghan revealed that her husband told her that he had ‘lost’ his father Prince Charles.

Meghan Markle’s debut podcast released Tuesday, tied to her agreement with streaming giant Spotify and reportedly worth $25 million, drew an underwhelming response from critics and some members of the public alike.

Like a little boy who runs the bases after striking out, Prince Andrew thought his disastrous BBC Jeffrey Epstein interview was a smashing success.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has mocked Prince Harry and the “string of foreign leaders” who attacked the US for scrapping Roe v. Wade.

Alito, 72, drew laughter with his scathing speech at a conference on religious liberty in Italy, his first public remarks since the landmark 1973 abortion rights decision was overturned.

“What really wounded me — what really wounded me — was when the Duke of Sussex addressed the United Nations and seemed to compare the decision whose name may not be spoken with the Russian attack on Ukraine,” Alito said in a sarcastic tone of Harry.