Shocking New Pictures of Frail King Charles Shatter Palace Fiction About His Health

One look at the King beside his heir is enough. The façade of health, the insistence on normality—it’s all collapsing in real time.

I was horrified by photographs that have emerged in the last few hours of the King at a joint engagement with his son, the Prince of Wales, in London for the COP30 climate summit.

Joint appearances by the two are rare enough, and this one—marking the handover to William, who will attend the summit in Brazil later this year on his father’s behalf—was an important way of symbolizing son and heir’s unanimity on the climate issue.

While the British media are faithfully toeing that line, I feel sure that when people see the pictures popping up on their newsfeeds, that won’t be their first reaction.

It’s impossible to look at these images (and I’m publishing a lot of them here, including some where he looks relatively OK, as I would hate people to think I was trying to mislead them with a selective edit) without seeing how much King Charles’s health has declined. The man’s suit is falling off him.