King to pause cancer treatment while on royal tour

Article by ITV Royal Editor Chris Ship

If you speak to any courtier in the Royal Household, they will acknowledge that the man they call “the boss” is not very good at slowing down.

King Charles is famously a workaholic, and one senior royal aide said to me recently he had been “chewing the carpet” during the early weeks of his cancer treatment when he was not allowed to carry out public duties.

This gave the King’s doctors a bit of a dilemma when they were consulted about the King and Queen’s planned royal tour to Australia and New Zealand this Autumn.

Allow him to go, and he won’t slow his working pace. Don’t allow him to go and risk causing offence Down Under and missing Charles’ first Commonwealth summit since he became the new Head of the Commonwealth upon the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth.

So, a compromise was sought: he can go ruled the medics, but he can’t do both Australia and New Zealand (so the smaller antipodean neighbour was dropped from the itinerary); he can’t work from noon until night (so evening engagements were dropped from all but one of the days); and he needs to get from the UK to Australia, Samoa (where the Commonwealth meeting is taking place) and back again in under ten days.

That means the King will miss only one of his scheduled weekly treatments for his cancer but his doctors have ruled that he will be just fine as the monarch has made better progress than they had anticipated since he started his course of treatment earlier this year.

There will be a dedicated medic travelling in the official party from what’s known as the Medical Household, but that is standard practice and has happened on all royal visits I’ve ever been on both before and after Charles became head of state.

The King and Queen still plan on attending around a dozen engagements each day on their tour despite scaling back their itinerary. / Credit: PA

Buckingham Palace has not disclosed the type of cancer the King has, only to rule out prostate cancer following his prostate procedure in January.

Despite scaling back the itinerary, King Charles and Queen Camilla will still clock up around a dozen engagements each day during the royal tour to Australia.

It will no longer take in any other states like Queensland and Victoria as the King might have been hoping and his travel has been restricted to Sydney and the capital, Canberra.

In Samoa, the King and Queen will undertake a state visit when they arrive in the Pacific island state and then King Charles will formally open the Commonwealth Heads of government Summit the following day and host receptions for leaders of the 56 member countries, like Sir Keir Starmer, and a formal welcome dinner in the evening.

King Charles meets former Samoa rugby player Freddie Tuilagi ahead of visiting the Polynesian island. / Credit: PA

Both the King, who turns 76 next month, and the Queen are taking on lighter duties in the days running up to the tour which will be followed by a busy schedule of engagements in November and December.

They are currently staying on the Balmoral estate in Aberdeenshire.

Charles and Camilla arrive in Australia on October 18 and is hoped the King will return to the UK by October 27 in order to recover and resume his medical treatment.