Her late Majesty used to deputise her dresser Angela Kelly to wear in her sensible low heels, making Kelly essentially the Blister Preventer Pursuivant. I hope that Queen Camilla has tapped one of her roster of official Companions, every one a Horse and Hound subscriber and woman who knows her way around the business end of a dead pheasant, to do the same.
Camilla has really been wearing out the shoe leather of late, because right now the 76-year-old is it. Tutta. The sum total of senior working members of the royal family who are not currently a) being fed coddled eggs in their sick bed or b) off in California hawking their truth or c) are so far down the line of succession that Getty doesn’t even send photographers to cover their away days.
Queen Camilla is single-handedly holding up the royal family. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty Images
On Tuesday, Buckingham Palace revealed that King Charles is being treated for an unspecified form of cancer, the shocking news coming only a week after Kate the Princess of Wales was discharged from hospital herself, having undergone planned abdominal surgery.
It is a situation that, if you really want to put a positive slant on things, is a category five disaster. (Optimism, thy name is not a royal courtier right now.)
Charles, fighting cancer. Kate, off the clock until April. Black sheep and man whose birthday is no longer marked by Westminster Abbey bells being rung, Prince Harry the Duke of Sussex, dashing across the Atlantic to see his father.
Time and time and time and time again in recent years the word ‘crisis’ has been liberally applied to royal goings on (what, moi?) but we have never seen anything like this before. What, I wonder, is more crisis-y than ‘crisis’?
I think it’s fair to say that we have reached the ‘catastrophe’ phase.
If Elmo’s recent viral “How is everybody doing?” Tweet registered at the Palace, the answer for courtiers is easy. NOT WELL. No one is okay, not even after a second lunchtime gin.