Should King Charles have announced the news of his cancer?

Everyone seems to agree that it is better for royal personages to be open if they have cancer. It helps thousands of other sufferers and their families. But nowadays sheer necessity is part of it: the omnipresent video evidence of the monarch’s daily life makes it unavoidable that people will notice physical changes. This applies to our present King. In her recent biography, George VI and Elizabeth, Sally Bedell Smith gives an excellent account of the illness of George VI, which probably began in 1949 and killed him in February 1952. Even in those days, people did begin to notice. She quotes Harold Nicolson, as early as March 1950, hearing from Paddy Leigh Fermor that the King, at an investiture, had to be ‘heavily made up with sun tan and rouge’ to conceal the pallor of the invalid. The following year, Princess Elizabeth led the Sovereign’s Parade on a horse called Winston, because the sovereign himself, her father, had cancelled his public engagements for six weeks. In early September, the doctors reversed their previous belief that the King did not have cancer. They did not tell the King or his family, but they thought his illness merited a public bulletin. It said his left lung had undergone ‘structural changes’. Why, Winston (the statesman, not the horse) asked his own doctor, Moran, while they are at cards in Chartwell. (He had to ask his doctor because, at that point, he was leader of the opposition, with no access to official secrets.) ‘Because,’ Moran told him and recorded in his diary, ‘they were anxious to avoid talking about cancer.’ ‘“But why?” he persisted.’ The answer was complicated – partly a prevailing inhibition about talking about cancer when it was so rarely curable, but also because of delicacy about the sovereign’s life. As Churchill himself said to Moran: ‘Under the Constitution, the duty of the King’s doctors is to prolong his life as long as possible.’