This week, King Charles will begin his Caribbean tour. I’m not falling for the palace’s PR game about it either. The palace is very openly trying to set the bar very low (in hell) so Charles will look amazing/kingly when he simply exceeds those bargain-basement expectations. Plus, it would be difficult for Charles to do worse than Prince William and Kate during their infamous 2022 Caribbean Flop Tour. Charles arrive in the Bahamas on Tuesday and the tour will end at Antigua and Barbuda for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (and Camilla is only showing up for the last part). The Times’ Roya Nikkhah had a preview and there are some interesting admissions in here. One of the biggest is that Charles knows he’s the last person in the UK who will ever care about the British Commonwealth. Some highlights from the Times’ “King Charles knows he’ll be the last royal head of the Commonwealth; Four years after Prince William’s awkward tour and surrounded by talk of slave reparations, Charles arrives this week with pride in his role.”

Remember the 2022 Flop Tour, LMAO: When the King boards the RAF Voyager on Tuesday bound for the Bahamas at the start of a nine-day Caribbean tour he will be hoping for less turbulence than the last high-profile royal visit to the region. In March 2022, a tour of Belize, the Bahamas and Jamaica by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge — as William and Catherine were then known — unravelled into a hot mess of controversy and diplomatic glitches. It whipped up heated debate around Britain’s colonial past and difficult questions about the future role of the monarchy in the Commonwealth.

The last royal head of the commonwealth: Charles, 77, knows his route will also be bumpy as he visits the Caribbean for the first time as King and, almost certainly, as the last royal head of the Commonwealth. After William’s tour four years ago, the prince indicated that unlike his father and grandmother, he would not lead the Commonwealth when he is monarch. In his post-match analysis of the trip, he said: “Who the Commonwealth chooses to lead its family in the future isn’t what is on my mind.” Last week sources close to William confirmed: “The position hasn’t changed.”

Camilla isn’t coming for the first part of this tour: Charles, who is still receiving cancer treatment, will travel solo to the Bahamas, Guyana and on to Antigua and Barbuda, where the Queen and the prime minister will join him for the Commonwealth heads of government meeting (CHOGM), which he will formally open as head of the Commonwealth on November 3. At every port of call the thorny issue of Britain’s role in the historic slave trade, and calls for reparations, will be inescapable.

No apologies: The King will “not shy away” from the issue but he won’t apologise — bound by his constitutional requirement to follow government advice that apologies and reparations aren’t necessary for acts that were not illegal at the time. Instead, Palace sources say, he will find opportunities to “reflect and renew his personal, wholehearted, and continuing commitment” to acknowledging the “darkest days of our past”. Before the trip, members of the Bahamas national reparations committee have let it be known that that won’t do. President Ali of Guyana, whom Charles will meet in Georgetown, the capital, during a visit celebrating 60 years of the country’s independence, has been clear that an apology and reparations are essential. As he said in an ITV interview last week: “You [Britain] who benefited tremendously … materially and financially … You exploited the region, you destroyed lives, you created underdevelopment.” Last week the Commonwealth secretary-general and Ghana’s former foreign minister, Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey, said the “time has come” for a discussion about reparations and an apology “wouldn’t hurt at all”.

The prime minister DGAF about the commonwealth either: Whitehall sources say that like most British prime ministers before him, Andy Burnham isn’t that fussed about the Commonwealth. If its royal headship lapses at the next reign change, the “family of nations” will become less relevant to the UK. “The British government hasn’t really known what to do with the Commonwealth for a long time,” Murphy said. “As for the notion in some quarters that it would suddenly become more important after Brexit — it hasn’t. From a Foreign Office perspective and within the Commonwealth community, the feeling is you never know when that network might be useful, so why walk away from it? On the basis of those mutual expectations, it will survive. But if there isn’t a royal headship of the Commonwealth in the future, the government might take a rather more backseat view of it.”

[From The Times]

While Charles will surely be the last monarch to head the commonwealth, QEII was the last monarch to really care about it. Charles doesn’t actually care, but he feels like it’s his place to hold this line and show up (and not apologize for jacksh-t). William won’t bother with this bare minimum, but I’m sure William is planning to order his staff to send out some misspelled tweets about the importance of the commonwealth. But yeah… an ancient, cancer-stricken king sitting through a bunch of awkward meetings about how no one will apologize for slavery, all while his heir is on vacation and Downing Street is looking at butterflies. I hope Commonwealth countries are paying attention to how Britain is actually treating them.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images, Instar.