Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Royals take centre stage before adoring crowds...
AT 2.25pm, as rain poured down on his crown, King Charles stepped onto the world’s most famous balcony for the first time since his mother’s passing.
He last appeared there almost a year ago, alongside the late Queen, at her Platinum Jubilee celebrations at Buckingham Palace.
Charles’ expression yesterday suggested an elation tempered by grief and a lifetime of fond memories of his beloved mother.
The King stayed on the balcony for 10 minutes, staring out at a sea of over 10,000 cheering people. Some had camped out for days to see this moment of history.
They popped champagne corks, sang the national anthem and chanted “hip hip hooray’’. And they roared their approval as he returned to the balcony for an encore.
Janice Quest and daughter Sarah Bradley ran down the Mall for a closer view. “Oh my goodness,” said Sarah, who came 230 miles from Plymouth. “It was phenomenal – the most amazing, spine-tingling moment.” At the King’s side on the balcony were his most loyal subjects and beloved family members.
Grandson Prince Louis, five, appeared the most excited, shouting and pointing. Mum Kate told him: “Wow, look at that, so cool!”
He even pretended to play a piano as the crowd sang, and applauded the two-and-ahalf-minute RAF flypast – scaled back to helicopters and the Red Arrows due to rain.
Siblings Princess Charlotte and Prince George waved to the crowds as dad Prince William joked with wife Kate. Brother Harry was absent, amid claims he wasn’t invited to the balcony. He was already on his way to Heathrow to fly back to California.
Body language expert Judi James said Queen Consort Camilla “took charge” on the balcony by “flicking her hands” impatiently – as her husband did when his pens leaked.
She said Charles looked “genuinely humbled by the crowd’s roar of affection” and called his encore his “sweet spot of the day”.
A leading lip reader revealed Charles exclaimed: “Oh my goodness, it’s wonderful. Thank you very much everybody.”
Palace and they spoke privately for about half an hour. Her desire for a cigarette and stiff gin afterwards was helpfully leaked to the media.
He had every right to be furious at that first introduction, but he has realised she makes his father more relaxed, and less difficult to deal with.
William has accepted that you have to make compromises in life.
Yesterday’s ceremony showed that the divide between him and Harry could not be starker. While William pledged allegiance to his father with a kiss on the cheek, Harry was not invited to do the same. The brothers did not even acknowledge each other.
If Harry hadn’t cut himself adrift, he would not be the third-class royal he is now. That’s him done and dusted – this is the end of his long goodbye.
But it was a long road to acceptability for our new Queen. The public’s first introduction was when she and Charles were photographed leaving The Ritz hotel in January 1999. The death of the
Queen Mother, who abhorred divorce, and the relaxing of the Church of England’s stance, ensured Camilla’s eventual acceptance into the royal circle.
With the Queen’s eventual blessing, the couple married in a civil ceremony at Windsor in April 2005.
Camilla was so nervous that it took four friends to coax her out of bed and help her into her Anna Valentine dress – rather belying Harry’s assertion that she schemed her path to the abbey with Machiavellian cunning.
Even then, there was no sign she would be Queen, the palace insisting she would become Princess Consort.
In fact, it was the Queen who was behind Camilla’s elevation, conferring upon her the titles of Privy Counsellor and Order of the Garter and requesting, shortly before she died, that she become Queen Consort.
Would Diana have approved? By now, it would be hoped that the princess would have found a partner and purpose that gave her new fulfilment.
Charles and Camilla should have been the rear view mirror of a life spent helping others. After all, the Parker Bowles family has remained civil, Andrew Parker Bowles being invited to the Abbey by his ex-wife.
Diana would have watched her sons from a distance, probably on telly at a friend’s house – just like the former king, the Duke of Windsor.
But there would be no dusting-off of her famous revenge dress.
After all, she may have mused, Charles had long followed in her glow.
For once King Charles III would be the star.