King faces new ‘lockdown’ of remote working and video calls

His Majesty determined to continue in-person meetings, but doctors may insist on reduced contact

As the King faces a new way of working, royal aides will draw heavily on the blueprint created during lockdown, when public engagements were abandoned and business was conducted at arm’s length.
The pandemic experience may prove something of a godsend for the Buckingham Palace team tasked with ensuring that, to the watching world at least, the monarch’s hand remains firmly on the tiller.
Crucially, as the King, 75, embarks on a routine of outpatient hospital appointments and potentially gruelling cancer treatment, he is determined to maintain his constitutional role.
He has vowed to continue his weekly audiences with Rishi Sunak and to make himself available for Privy Council meetings and select private meetings, even though in the longer term, they may take a different form.
If the King is advised by his medical team to significantly reduce public contact in order to minimise infection risk, he will revert to video conferencing and remote calls.
Royal aides admit that the monarch’s new regime is still being worked through, the focus thus far having been on managing his health and care, followed by planning how the delicate news of his diagnosis was to be shared with the world.
Only now, with the King’s treatment plan in place and messages of support flooding in from world leaders, has the focus shifted to the day-to-day.
Charles plans to balance his time by hopping between various residences, spending short periods of the week in London, where he is being treated, followed by longer periods at either Highgrove, his Gloucestershire home, or Sandringham in Norfolk.
Wherever he is, sources insist, the King will be “working throughout” and is hoping that meetings will continue to be held in person.
“Although he has been advised to minimise public-facing duties, this is not because he has been physically impacted by his diagnosis or his treatment but to lower the threshold of risk,” one source said.
“A meeting involving five people is very different to walking down a street through a crowd of hundreds.”
Aides are aware of the need to be flexible. If the King’s doctors advise him to stop flitting between residences and to reduce his travel, he will do so.
His weekly audience with the Prime Minister, which traditionally takes place on a Wednesday, would be the last commitment he would forgo, The Telegraph understands.
Such a busy weekly travel schedule may sound exhausting to most people in their mid-70s but for the King, it is entirely normal.
“We have become used to a peripatetic court,” one aide wryly noted, reflecting on his boss’s tendency to bounce around. Indeed, it is rare for the monarch to spend more than two nights in any one place.
In recent months, the King had tended to spend Thursdays and Fridays at Windsor Castle, before returning on a Sunday afternoon, ensuring that he was perfectly placed to see his three elder grandchildren, Prince George, 10, Princess Charlotte, eight, and Prince Louis, five.
With Windsor no longer featuring in his weekly schedule, such visits may now be curtailed, although the King is likely to maintain contact with the children remotely.
The most dramatic shift, however, will be the enforced, sudden abandonment of the public engagements upon which he thrives.
The King is known for encouraging aides to cram in as many official visits into any one day as humanly possible, enjoying nothing better than being out and about.
Instead, he will busy himself reading up on matters of state and the latest developments concerning his various charities and environmental interests.
As royal author Robert Hardman revealed in his recent book, Charles III, the King loves to read, often asking for more information from state papers.
“He reads a lot of stuff he doesn’t need to read,” Mr Hardman quoted one aide as saying.
“He might complain about some things, but work isn’t one of them. Having a lot on his plate is what he likes. Having too much on his plate is never going to worry him.”
For the King, correspondence is a form of relaxation, much preferred over watching television, for example.
As such, he will likely revel in the influx of letters he is now likely to receive as people near and far respond to his cancer diagnosis. Aides acknowledged that he would certainly rise to the challenge with gusto.
Meanwhile, the necessary postponement of public engagements coupled with the desire for the King to be seen, will almost certainly result in images being released of the monarch at work, or videos of selected meetings.
The new routine will see the palace plunged once again into its digital-first strategy, embracing the prospect of video conferencing and dialling into meetings remotely.
In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, the then Prince Charles was said to have embraced the changes presented by lockdown from the onset.
Clive Alderton, who remains his principal private secretary, said at the time: “Their Royal Highnesses adapted literally overnight to a new digital-first way of working.”
He revealed that Charles and Camilla used everything from Zoom to Microsoft Teams, and even House Party. Images showed that, much like the rest of the nation, the King used laptops and devices propped up on piles of books and papers as he spoke to charity chiefs and business leaders.
Simon Lewis, communication secretary to Elizabeth II from 1998 until 2000, acknowledged that much of the back and forth between No 10 and Buckingham Palace went on behind the scenes.
“The King will be absolutely focused on that and I know, from the people around him, that he will be absolutely itching to get on with that and continuing doing that,” he told Radio 4’s Today programme.
“It’s getting the balance right between being treated for cancer but wanting to get on with the day job.”
Mr Hardman agreed that aides would be hoping to maintain their upbeat approach, reaffirming their message of stability.
“At the time of Covid, we ended up seeing and hearing a lot more of the Queen than we were used to… I think we can look to more of that,” he said.
“Certainly, there’s no sense of constitutional worries. The machinery is there if it’s needed but right now it’s not needed.”
The author said the first notable absence might come on March 11, Commonwealth Day, when the King as head of the Commonwealth would normally lead senior members of the Royal family at a service at Westminster Abbey.
“I’m sure there will be a statement, a message, as he will want to engage with that,” Hardman said.
“It’s moments like that when absence is noted but the day-to-day running of the monarchy won’t change.”