King Charles is “able to reach the parts that dare I say politicians probably couldn’t quite have reached”. During the Caribbean tour, the monarch was exposed to intense heat, a torrential downpour, and more than thirty engagements in nine days.
The King appeared very frustrated with a close protection officer, who didn’t get an umbrella to him intime before he became drenched at a cricket stadium in Antigua. Reacting to the incident, a senior palace aide told GB News: “You know sometimes things don’t work entirely according to plan, but it was very quickly resolved, and as we saw, he was laughing. I was lucky enough to be sitting up, sitting up with the Queen, not getting wet. She came back up, as had always been the plan, and she looked round at me, and she just burst into sort of fits of laughter, saying, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so wet in my life.’
“And then the King, when we got back, was laughing about the watercress comment again, saying, ‘I think that might be the last you see of that suit,’ but he thought it was genuinely funny. But what you know, he’s a man who does his job properly. He’s a man who understands the importance of ceremony, who understands the importance of ritual, and he will have wanted that to be disrupted for the shortest possible time because of this rather sudden, rather unexpected, rather extreme downpour.”
The King joked to the Antiguan Prime Minister he could now grow watercress on his trousers; they were so wet. His Majesty turns 78 next Saturday and is continuing cancer treatment.