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Lifting his top hat from his head, King Charles greeted attendees of his Buckingham Palace garden party with a smile on May 12. But amid the hundreds of handshakes and well wishes the monarch handed out that day, there was one notable comment about his own health that caught the attention of onlookers.
It’s been just five months since Charles – who went public with his cancer diagnosis in 2024 – shared the “good news” that his schedule of treatment could be “reduced” this year”.
And yet, there are rumblings that all is not quite as rosy as the King would have us believe.
We all remember, of course, that comment from his son Prince Harry in May, when the Duke of Sussex told the BBC he didn’t know “how much longer” his father had left.
That was followed by a bombshell claim by author and journalist Tom Sykes – the man behind The Royalist substack – that “Prince William is in charge now” and “nobody in the British media can risk saying that. Yet.”
“What is really going on here, of course, is the thing the UK newspapers and the outlets around the world that recycle their copy can’t tell you: power is bleeding from King Charles to Prince William because Charles is dying,” he claimed.
Now, the King himself has done nothing to quench the discourse around the state of his health as he shared a telling insight with Virginia Cavill, a wheelchair-bound attendee of his garden party.
The guest had recently fallen and broken her ankle, and it led Charles to discuss ageing.
“This is the trouble as you get older, I know it’s going to happen to me,” he said.
When Virginia asked Charles how he, himself, was doing, he gave a small smile.
“I’m OK, I totter along,” he said.
It was hardly the kind of statement that signals a monarch flourishing with good health, but indeed perhaps that is not a surprise.
For when Charles shared the “good news” about his treatment back in 2025, his statement stopped short of saying treatment would be stopped.
The latest update about Charles’ health comes as Harry is said to have “outraged” senior royals with a “string of demands” ahead of a planned return to the UK with his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.
Harry is set to touch down in the country for the WellChild Awards in July, and sources claim he is “rubbing a lot of people up the wrong way” with a list of “demands” made for Meghan.
“The last thing he wants is Meghan walking into a situation where she feels judged, and he says all he’s asking is that she’s treated with basic respect and not cast as the bad guy before anything’s even happened,” a source told Heat World.
However, more family drama – on top of the ongoing fallout of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein – is likely to do nothing to aid Charles’ wellbeing.
In February, royal expert Richard Fitzwilliams gave an interview to Fox News Digital, in which he spoke of family concerns over Charles’ health.
“There is no doubt that the pressures on King Charles, who is suffering from cancer, are intense. William and Catherine are reportedly extremely concerned about the way the crisis over Andrew Mountbatten Windsor is developing and the effect this is having on the King’s health,” the expert said.
Adding to intrigue on the matter was the revelation, earlier this year, that Charles’ father – Prince Philip – suffered from inoperable pancreatic cancer for eight years before his death, aged 99, in 2021.
