Health double whammy hits royal hopes of an annus mirabilis

Prince of Wales will also be sidelined as he looks after his wife, leaving the slimmed-down ‘Firm’ stretched

The Royal family had hoped that 2024 would be a vast improvement on last year, but the double whammy of the King’s prostate treatment and the Princess of Wales’s abdominal surgery has highlighted the perils of a slimmed-down monarchy.
Having endured 2023 without their beloved Queen Elizabeth II, coped with the fallout from Spare, the Duke of Sussex’s incendiary autobiography, and pulled off the first coronation in 70 years, things were finally looking up for the House of Windsor.
Royal tours were back on the agenda, with the Prince and Princess of Wales planning to travel to Rome in the spring – their first joint overseas visit in two years after their controversial Caribbean trip in March 2022.
The monarch and Queen Camilla also hit the ground running with talk of a visit to Australia and the launch of the Queen’s new Reading Room podcast.
But Wednesday’s unexpected royal health announcements – made within 90 minutes of each other – threaten to derail what the King had hoped would be a period of stability for the fledgling Carolean era.
With the Prince of Wales, 41, expected to down tools to look after his 42-year-old wife as she spends the next few months recuperating at Adelaide Cottage, their Windsor home, three of the four most senior royals will be out of action. International travel has also been shelved for the foreseeable future.
This wouldn’t have been so much of a problem in the old days, when the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and the Duke of York were still supporting Crown and country as working royals.
Indeed, a contingency plan is already in place for these sorts of emergencies – with five counsellors of state, including the Queen, appointed to cover for the King should he be temporarily unable to undertake his official duties because of illness or absence abroad.
Yet the trouble is that all of the next three adult royals in the line of succession after Prince William – the Dukes of Sussex and York, and Princess Beatrice – do not have a public role. As a result, the Regency Act was amended in 2022 to add the Duke of Edinburgh (Prince Edward) and Princess Anne to the roster.
The heir to the throne’s absence, albeit temporary, makes the King’s supporting cast look more slender than ever. 
The Queen is the first royal who will be called upon to step up while her husband undergoes a corrective procedure on his enlarged prostate next week.
Despite the House of Lords adding Anne and Edward, the official royal website still lists his stand-ins as “The Queen, The Prince of Wales, The Duke of Sussex, The Duke of York and Princess Beatrice”.
The hard-working Princess Royal did warn of the pitfalls of slimming down the monarchy last March when she was asked about her brother’s plans to strip back the royal workforce to make it more “value for money”.
“Well, I think the ‘slimmed down’ was said in a day when there were a few more people around,” said the 73-year-old grandmother of five. “It doesn’t sound like a good idea from where I’m standing, I would say. I’m not quite sure what else we can do.”
The problem of there being too few royals to go around has been compounded by Princess Alexandra, 87, significantly scaling back her workload in the past year because of her advancing years, along with the Duke of Kent (although to be fair to the late Queen’s 88-year-old cousin, he did still manage an impressive 69 royal engagements last year).
Aides have been careful to ensure that the King and the Queen, at 75 and 76 respectively, are not overloaded as they adjust to life on the throne.
One palace insider suggested that the Queen has struggled with the new-found pace, while the transition has left the King feeling “anxious”, according to another source. The Queen undertook 233 public duties last year, behind Princess Anne on 457, the King on 425 and the Duke of Edinburgh (Prince Edward) on 297.
The Prince and Princess of Wales have also faced criticism for only carrying out a few more engagements than the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, who are both in their seventies.
They have made no secret of their desire to be hands-on parents to Prince George, 10, Princess Charlotte, eight, and five-year-old Prince Louis, which goes some way to explaining why the Prince has chosen to put his immediate family ahead of his commitments to the family “Firm”.
The Princess’s prolonged absence from public life will arguably be felt most keenly. As the wife and the mother of future kings, she has been playing a pivotal role. She is not just one of the most popular royals but also, like her late mother-in-law Diana, has enough star quality to keep the institution on the front pages.
Renowned for “never having put a foot wrong”, she garnered considerable public sympathy after being targeted by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in their Netflix series and memoir.
This week, Robert Hardman’s newly-published biography of the King revealed how the Prince of Wales was left furious over his brother’s “blatant attack” against his wife.
The Duke of Sussex said in the Netflix documentary that royal men “marry someone who fits the mould – as opposed to somebody who you perhaps are destined to be with”.
In Charles III: New King. New Court, Hardman writes that despite the Duke not specifying to whom he was referring: “For William, this was the lowest of the low.” Hardman describes the Prince as “mortified” by his brother’s “casual betrayal” of fraternal secrets in Spare, while claiming the King was also “deeply hurt” by Harry’s accusations.
There is no doubt that the past 12 months – indeed the past three years – have proved highly stressful for the royals, and now they are having to contend with health problems on top.
It couldn’t come at a worse time for a family yearning for an annus mirabilis after the horrors of Megxit.