Something strange happened after Queen Elizabeth II died: the tide in the U.K. seemed to shift around the recently anointed King Charles III, who spent much of his life being generally disliked for some combination of perceived ineptitude, controversy, lack of leadership and, well, lack of likability. It came as a surprise, then, his sudden boost in approval ratings after the queen passed away.
But it appears that’s now over.
Charles’ comparatively lower approval ratings — his mother maintained around an 80% approval rating for the last decade of her life — has precipitated an existential crisis of sorts for the monarchy.
I am half-English and have spent a lot of my life there. Throughout much of my childhood, collective dissatisfaction over the heir to the throne hummed in the background, a cultural fixture of sorts. This reached its peak with Charles’ 1993 phone sex scandal, in which secretly recorded conversations between him and Camilla Parker Bowles, during their extramarital affair, were released — a big embarrassment for Charles, not least because of his appalling attempt at dirty talk (lest you forget, he professed to wanting to be Camilla’s tampon).
I was in England when the queen died and the change in attitude toward Charles was palpable, if not a little jarring for a republican — or anti-monarchist — such as myself. The tenor changed. The media was overwhelmingly sympathetic. Even my own mother, for whom Charles had been a point of ridicule, exhibited a newfound affection for Elizabeth’s heir. Charles’ approval ratings shot up to 70% in the immediate aftermath of his mother’s death, after steadily hovering between 50% and 60% for the previous decade. The latest Ipsos poll, however, released April 28, shows Charles’ approval ratings plummeting to 49%.
Any distaste for Charles as an individual is of course matched by the monarchy’s own baggage, a veritable who’s who of transgressions and atrocities, from racism to…
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