Could it be that Queen Camilla has quietly, after all these years, been accepted by the British people? We’ve watched her navigate the past turbulent days with dignity and grit, just ploughing on with her public duties and keeping the drama low. I suspect that her steady-Eddy style is going down well, particularly since it’s now clear that the woman is a grafter, and we like a grafter.
How admirable her low-key style seems when compared to the antics of the Sussexes
Looking back, we could see that she was a first-class trooper at the end of January when she opened a new Maggie Centre at the Royal Free Hospital in London; elegant in turquoise and smiling her broad toothy smile. The public didn’t yet know about Charles’s cancer diagnosis, but surely Camilla did. And yet, you really couldn’t tell that anything was wrong as she gamely shook hands and posed for photographs.
Then, after the flash-visit of Prince Harry, she once again showed her mettle. Having settled Charles back at Sandringham she set off for Salisbury to attend a charity concert. By her own admission, she’s a bit doddery these days. Yet, when the helicopter was grounded due to treacherous weather, she travelled by car on that six-hour journey, arriving in the wind and rain, smile on, small-talk at the ready.
There will be a lot more of this to come over the coming weeks and months: getting up and getting on with the humdrum daily duties while supporting Charles at home. Yes, we all do it when times are hard. But to do it in public, always showing good cheer, never making a mistake, being high-energy at the age of 76 – that’s tough and in the spirit of our dear departed Queen, the hardest grafter of all.
It’s been a long road for Camilla – so vilified for her role as the third person in Charles’s marriage to Diana and, for the most part, unloved by the public in the years that followed the marital breakdown. It didn’t help that, over the decades, we were fed stories of how funny she was in private, how friendly and kind. It seemed too much like the teacher instructing you to be nice to the new girl, to be her friend. Sure, you’d make an effort. Show her where the loos were and so forth – but in the end she’d have to earn her place in your affections.
For me, that moment has come for Camilla and, funnily enough, it’s been helped along by her most voluble adversary, Prince Harry. When in Spare and in interviews he described her as a dangerous woman, scheming and manipulating the press, and only concerned with her own image, it was hard not to think ‘steady on there!’ And when he warned that ‘with her on the way to being Queen Consort, there was gonna be people or bodies left in the street because of that’… well, how could you not support her?
How admirable her low-key style seems when compared to the antics of the Sussexes in Montecito. There’s Camilla being blown about by the gales in Salisbury and being nice to volunteers for the Wiltshire Bobby Van Trust, taking an interest in their mission to help the over sixties with their home security, and there’s flash-Harry jetting off to Las Vegas to attend a swanky American football awards ceremony in the role of rent-a-Prince, making lame jokes onstage, lapping up show-biz style faux-adoration. ‘Man, man… Prince freaking Harry. Man, I’m shocked. That’s Prince Harry,’ were the first words of NFL star Cam Hayward when accepting an award. Such a contrast with something like: ‘I hope you enjoy the military band Ma’am.’
And the contrast in judgement is theatrically stark. Camilla getting it right with stoicism and humanity, Harry getting it wrong, for whatever strange reason, with his unpalatable mix of grandiosity and performative victimhood. Perhaps King Charles’s ill-health is forcing us to see Camilla properly.
We’ve known her all these years as someone behind the scenes – and she has never wanted to be centre-stage – supporting a man often portrayed as tetchy and grumpy, lifting him up, being his stay. That’s noble and relatable. But it wasn’t enough to take her into our hearts. But now – serving us, the public, as much as him, the prickly King – we see that she is, as one below-the-line commentator put it, ‘a decent old stick.’ And a hard grafting old stick. Better a grafter than a grifter.
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