From going to the opera while his sons are in hospital, to hiding money offshore,
to his absolute disaster of a relationship with Princess Diana, to the toe-curling
cringefest that is “Tampongate” - Yeah, we’ll explain that later- the Black Spider Memos,
and so much more, there are plenty of reasons why the people of Great Britain and the world
may not feel all that reverent to King Charles. For starters, he doesn’t seem to be all that
great of a dad. The father of two sons, Prince Harry and William, the former has,
in recent years, outright accused the now monarch of the UK of being unsupportive during one of the
hardest times in his life. Of course, we’re referring to the death of Princess Diana,
and we’ll be getting back to her shortly. But as for Prince Harry, he claims that
Charles isolated him as a young boy while he was grieving the death of his mother, Diana. At the
age of twelve, this left Harry unable to fully process the emotional trauma that this loss had
inflicted on him. If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to lose a loved one, then you’ll no doubt
know how hard that can be, especially at such a developmental age. Add to that the fact that
Princess Diana wasn’t just Harry’s mother but also a public figure, and she was held in high
regard by the British public. This meant her death triggered nationwide mourning, and in the midst
of this, young Prince Harry was left without a support structure by Charles, his father.
While Harry and his brother William aren’t the only children to have lost a parent,
they had to wear their grief in the eyes of the public, which could only have intensified the pain
they must’ve felt. After all, they were children then, and processing grief is hard enough for most
fully grown adults to do. It can’t be understated that the role Charles played – or rather, didn’t
play – in that grieving process must’ve profoundly impacted both his sons. Harry happens to have been
the most vocal about it, and according to him, Charles’ failings as a father have put a strain
on their relationship that continues today. That’s not to say his relationship with his
other son is much better either. In 1991, Prince William was struck in the head with a golf club
while at private school and hospitalized as a result. His injuries required emergency surgery,
but despite Princess Diana rushing to his bedside, at the time, Charles attended the opera instead of
checking on his eight-year-old son. Speaking of Princess Diana,
it’s impossible to talk about Charles and not mention her -the two were married, after all.
Diana and Charles had arguably one of the most publicly scrutinized and documented marriages
of all time. However, it was far from idyllic. It even started rocky when, during an interview
about their engagement in 1981, Charles was asked if he loved Diana. His response wasn’t
exactly the enthusiastic response you’d expect from someone who’d been newly engaged. Instead,
he replied with “Whatever love means.” Diana once said she wanted to be queen
of people’s hearts. Given how revered she was and still is, many of Diana’s fans refuse to
forgive Charles for his treatment of her during their marriage. The couple separated in 1992,
and only two years later – before their divorce had even occurred – Charles would publicly admit
to an affair. He’d been seeing another since 1986 while he was still married to Princess Diana.
A divorce can often be messy and fraught with tensions and high emotions, even if
it’s ultimately better for the couple involved to be apart from one another. But being royals made
Charles’ divorce both public and particularly messy. After a separation of four years,
they divorced in August 1996, a year before Diana’s untimely death.
The scandal associated with their divorce wasn’t singularly bookended by the death of Princess
Diana, though. No, things took a turn for the… well, the downright bizarre when recordings of
a six-minute phone call between Charles – the Prince of Wales at the time – and his mistress,
Camilla Parker Bowles, were leaked. During the call, Charles expressed his desire to be
reincarnated as… a tampon. The pair were speaking intimately, with Charles making a joke about
turning into a pair of ‘knickers’ or a tampon so that he could live inside Camilla’s pants.
Yikes. This uncomfortable exchange (believe us,
we’ve heard the audio recording) was actually picked up by a radio hobbyist using a scanner.
From there, it eventually leaked to the British tabloids, fuelling the media fire surrounding
Charles’ separation from Diana at the time. The story was published in 1992, however, the
call itself had been recorded five years earlier while the two were still married. This scandal,
since referred to as Tampongate, caused Charles’ popularity to plummet, aided by the scathing
attention of the press targeting him and Camilla. As bad as Charles’ affair was, his infidelity
affected Diana even before it was public knowledge. She claimed that Charles and
the rest of the royal family gaslit her, telling the Princess she was paranoid whenever she voiced
her suspicions about Camilla. She even believed that Charles was jealous of her popularity among
the public and would apparently punish her by making himself emotionally unavailable.
Charles and Camilla eventually married at the Windsor Guildhall on April 9, 2005. However,
by marrying Camilla, Charles also seemingly broke a major royal rule. It had, at least historically,
been considered offensive for a royal to marry someone who had been previously divorced,
and Camilla had divorced her ex-husband Andrew in 1995. So, when it comes to marriages,
it’s safe to say Charles’ decisions haven’t always been considered the most sound.
We wonder if he’s made any other regrettable decisions. Oh, look!
In 2017, Charles would land himself in even more hot water over certain investments he’d
made. Along with plenty of other high-profile and wealthy individuals, Charles was exposed in
a series of leaked financial documents known as the Paradise Papers, which shed light on how the
wealthy elite kept much of their money offshore in order to avoid paying taxes on their earnings.
The Papers also revealed that Charles had invested in a forestry company that lobbied
to change certain climate change rules for their own benefit. Charles had publicly advocated for
environmental protection, so naturally, this looked pretty hypocritical and certainly made
his strong, outspoken stance on such a pivotal issue seem like little more than PR posturing.
You see, as a wise person once said, within a constitutional monarchy,
it’s actually parliament that has all the power. Charles might now be the head of state,
but a monarch has to keep themselves out of the political goings on of their country. However,
Charles has something of a track record of sticking his nose where it shouldn’t be. His lack
of impartiality came to a head with the ominously named Black Spider memos; their name actually
refers to Charles’ distinctive handwriting style. These were a series of letters containing
correspondence between Charles and several senior officials within the British government. The
Black Spider memos only saw the light of day in 2015, after a ten-year-long
legal battle to keep them hidden from the public. Already not off to a great start,
Sent between 2004 and 2005, Charles’ letters were essentially him trying to lobby the British
government. He made direct demands to the prime minister at the time, Tony Blair, relating to the
Iraq War. In his letters, Charles said he wanted the equipment being used by British troops in Iraq
to be improved. He also called for a cull of all badgers, apparently to prevent the spread
of disease, as well as making the suggestion that one of his own royal aides designed new hospitals.
All in all – if you discount the one about the active conflict at the time – the requests were
relatively harmless and easy to dismiss. However, the issue was Charles using his
position to attempt to influence the British government. As a member of the royal family,
Charles knew he had to remain politically neutral and couldn’t get involved with any policy-making
decisions, yet he attempted to anyway. And for years, ever since the Black Spider memos were
published, he’s not faced much in the way of consequences for overstepping that boundary.
While he’s since tried to defend the memos as nothing more than letters of concern
and claims he’ll act within constitutional parameters as king, what’s indefensible is the
government spending hundreds of thousands of the taxpayers’ money on the legal battle to prevent
Charles’ actions ever seeing the light of day. When he’s not interfering with the government,
Charles has advocated for a number of topics, espousing the benefits of organic food and
sustainable farming practices. Among them is a certain interest in, or maybe even an obsession
with, alternative remedies. Leading scientists have even criticized him for advocating for
pseudoscientific practices including homeopathy, reflexology, iridology, and Gerson therapy,
attempting to treat cancer with fruit juice and coffee enemas instead of chemotherapy.
In fact, in the Black Spider memos, one of Charles’ requests was that homeopathic
medicines be made more readily available in the UK. For those who might not know, homeopathy is
an alternative medicine that is based on a theory of treating ‘like with like’. It claims that a
person can be healed of a disease by administering substances that mimic symptoms of said disease.
For example, if someone suffers from hay fever, the homeopathic remedy for it is derived from
raw onions since they can typically cause stinging and irritation in the eyes and nose,
much like hay fever symptoms. Another key factor of this bizarre, pseudoscientific
approach to health is homeopathic dilution: Where the medicinal factor in the treatment is
incredibly small, and is repeatedly distilled in water or alcohol and shaken vigorously.
Charles is a patron of the Faculty of Homeopathy, an organization that promotes the practice. Many
professionals in the medical and scientific field called him anti-science for championing
alternative medicine, and as an educational YouTube channel, we can’t help but agree.
One of the things Charles is widely known for – apart from his infidelity – is his charity,
The Prince’s Trust, which is focused on helping vulnerable young people who are unemployed or
struggling at school to get their lives on track. However, in 2022, the Foundation was
under investigation by the police for what was referred to as the Cash for Honours scandal.
Allegedly, a close aide to Charles offered a knighthood to Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz,
a Saudi billionaire, in exchange for a large two million dollar donation to the charity.
Charles wasn’t accused of facilitating this arrangement himself, or at least, his team
denied he had any knowledge of the matter. From things allegedly done without Charles’
involvement to yet another a mistake he made publicly. In 2005, Charles attended the funeral
of Pope John Paul II. During that event, he was photographed shaking the hand of Zimbabwe’s leader
at the time, Robert Mugabe. Who is Robert Mugabe? He was a former revolutionary who later served as
both Prime Minister and President of Zimbabwe after securing the country’s independence after
decades of white minority rule. However, Mugabe also established a one-party rule, allowing
himself to stay in power. When his popularity began to decline in Zimbabwe, Mugabe enacted a
brutal and repressive regime that included having his political opposition harassed and beaten.
At the Pope’s funeral in 2005, Mugabe had a travel ban placed on him by the European Union,
which he circumvented in order to attend the funeral in the Vatican, which is technically
its own independent sovereign state. Needless to say, given the divisive figure Mugabe was,
the global public was less than pleased to see pictures of Charles greeting him.
Let’s take a look at some things that have come out about Charles from behind the secretive walls
of Buckingham Palace. Prince Harry, Charles’ youngest son, married Meghan Markle in 2018,
and the pair had a son, Archie, the following year. However, it seems Charles might’ve had
something to say about that… something racist, in fact. Given that Meghan is a biracial woman,
Charles and Camilla allegedly made untoward comments about his grandson’s race before
Archie was born. While talking during breakfast one morning, he said, “What do
you suppose their children’s complexion might be?” Although Harry and Meghan refused to reveal who
had made the comment, they later clarified that it was neither Queen Elizabeth II nor her husband,
the late Prince Philip. And although Prince William defended the royal family by claiming
they weren’t a racist family, if Charles was the one who said it, it wouldn’t be
the first time he’s made remarks like this. He caused controversy a number of years earlier
when it was revealed he referred to his friend, Kolin Dhillon, a British Asian businessman,
as a nickname with somewhat racial connotations. Dhillon defended Charles against accusations of
racism, claiming it was an affectionate nickname. Sadly, though, Charles didn’t stop there.
When The Voice, Britain’s only Black newspaper, published its fortieth-anniversary issue,
it received heavy criticism from its readers. This was because Charles had
been asked to guest-edit the issue, which was considered in extremely poor taste
given that the royal family not only directly benefitted from the slave trade in Britain,
but enabled it thanks to Elizabeth I. The editors of The Voice initially publicly supported Charles
but later released a statement acknowledging the criticism and urging the monarchy to
apologize for its role in the slave trade. His stance on the environment might not
be the only thing about Charles that’s fake, either. He faced quite an embarrassment when
it was discovered that several of the paintings hanging in his stately home were actually fakes.
One of these, believed to be an original Monet painting worth over seventy million dollars, was
actually a forgery by an American, not the French impressionist’s work. More counterfeit art was
found to be on display at Dumfries House, the headquarters of The Prince’s Foundation, too.
As if all of these aforementioned controversies weren’t enough, the institution that he is now
the figurehead of and how he benefits from it adds even more to the already mountainous
pile of reasons to dislike Charles. Most other monarchies in Europe have no governing power;
their existences as heads of state are largely ceremonial, more of a tradition than a position
with any real influence over the laws of a country. While the same can largely be said
of Charles, his role as monarch has granted him access to a vast fortune and control over
all his deceased mother’s assets. This is estimated to have increased his personal
wealth to somewhere around two billion pounds. That might sound like a cushy deal, but it
gets even better for Charles. As a monarch, he is exempt from paying income tax, capital gains tax,
or inheritance tax. Do you want to know what makes this not just particularly egregious but
actively insulting to the British public? Well, although we can’t go into the nuances and reasons
why this has happened in this video, the UK is, at present, in the grip of a cost of living crisis.
Their current government, including the unelected prime minister, has made it easier for massive
energy corporations to raise the already staggering cost of gas and electricity bills,
all while members of parliament pocket a share of the profits from these companies given their
close personal ties. In this way, they’re already robbing the taxpaying public to the point where
the costs of everyday essentials like food are rising. Still, wages aren’t increasing in order to
match inflation - A story that people all over the world right now are sadly extremely familiar with.
To make matters worse, though, the government isn’t the only thing stealing from the UK public.
Do you know who pays Charles’ already unjustifiable salary? That’s right,
the same British taxpayers who are struggling to heat their own homes and feed their own
children. Even worse, his public funding is set to increase in the coming years.
Currently, Charles is set to make an already extortionate eighty-six million pounds until 2025,
when this amount is estimated to increase by a projected thirty-eight million. That will
grant this man over one hundred and twenty four million pounds per year,
on top of his existing fortune. This is a man whose sole job, we’ll remind you,
is to attend public events in a purely representational capacity.
While there was some speculation that Charles would be a reformist and would make efforts to
reconfigure the monarchy into a purely ceremonial and traditional institution that didn’t siphon off
such inexcusable amounts of the public’s money, he has since proved that he intends to keep getting
rich off the backs of ordinary citizens. That’s the Ugly Truth about King Charles.