For months now, the messaging from Buckingham Palace has been pretty muted about King Charles and Queen Camilla’s big tour of Australia, which starts in a few days. There hasn’t been wall-to-wall embiggening in advance of the tour, and the palace has been steadily trying to lower expectations to the point where if Charles manages to come home alive, they’ll declare victory. I also believe there’s been an emphasis on Charles and his health concerns because no one wants to admit that Camilla is a wreck. As Ingrid Seward said this week, Camilla “gets very tired because she’s not born to this royal life… and I think people sometimes forget that Camilla’s never actually had a job. I think she finds these trips extremely exhausting. She doesn’t like flying. She’s not a great traveller, and she’s not good in the heat.” I’m just saying, some of the “Charles is going to have a difficult tour” fussing is actually a cover for how badly Camilla performs on the road. Speaking of, the Sydney Morning Herald decided to run a preview of the tour with a focus on Camilla: “From ‘horse face’ to ‘Britain’s grandmother’: How Queen Camilla won over a sceptical public.” LMAO!!!

At her lowest ebb, when Britain hated her, the tabloids were describing her as frump, old trout and horse face, and even Queen Elizabeth described her as “that wicked woman”, Queen Camilla is said to have been pelted with bread rolls at a bakery.

She might now be touted as Britain’s new grandmother, but few public figures have known the depths of opprobrium reached by Camilla Parker Bowles in the late 1990s after the exposure of her affair with Prince Charles and in the dark days after Diana’s death. She was reviled by much of the English-speaking world as the “old boiler” who broke the heart of the most loved woman on the planet. It was hell. There is doubt that the bread roll incident really happened, but there is no question that she was under constant siege from a baying press. As a non-royal, she had no right to police protection. Schooled in the world of the stiff upper lip, she never defended herself. Charles was busy fighting battles of his own, so she weathered much of the maelstrom alone, holed up in her country home.

“I wouldn’t want to put my worst enemy through it,” she later said.

The relationship between Camilla and Charles has survived almost anything that could be thrown at it. For decades, every power in the kingdom – from the queen to the archbishop to the prime minister to the populace – wanted it over. Yet against all odds, they’re still together almost 55 years later. The tale of these two staid 70-somethings has become the enduring royal love story of their generation.

“The relationship between the King and Queen is, I believe, a true love match,” says Juliet Rieden, royal correspondent, former Australian Women’s Weekly editor at large and author of The Royals in Australia. “When you see them together they always look intensely happy in each other’s company, laughing and joking and deep in conversation.”

The bread roll era is long over for Queen Camilla. She’ll never rival her glamorous stepdaughters-in-law for attention, but an August poll found almost half of Britons had a positive view of her – up 10 per cent from five years earlier. The society magazine Tatler described her as “the nation’s new grandmother” (a moniker once used for Queen Elizabeth) and noted increasing sympathy towards her among Zoomers.

[From SMH]

This is the biggest “trying to make fetch happen” ever. Twenty-five years of careful planning, high-priced image consultants, hair stylists, dressmakers, and courtiers crafting a sympathetic charitable portfolio, and Camilla consistently ruins all of it by being Camilla. She comes across as a drunk, hateful old bag. She cozies up to the biggest bullies and abusers in the UK because like attracts like. She travels poorly because she doesn’t care about “the natives.” She is not beloved by Gen Z either – The Crown introduced a new generation to the Camilla-Charles-Diana saga and there’s a reason why Gen Z uses “Princess Diana” as a catch-all term of endearment. I cannot wait to see what the Aussies have in store for Cam.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images.