Charles

Never in British history has a monarch had so long to prepare for the role. Seven decades after he became heir to the throne aged three, King Charles III ...

[Purchase a Print subscription for 11,12 € per week You will be billed 107,91 € per month after the trial ends](https://subs.ft.com/spa3_uk3m?segmentId=461cfe95-f454-6e0b-9f7b-0800950bef25&utm_us=JJIBAX&utm_eu=WWIBEAX&utm_ca=JJIBAZ&utm_as=FIBAZ&ft-content-uuid=fc94381b-fbc6-4684-93b7-ad9fdec56ee3) [Purchase a Digital subscription for 6,64 € per week You will be billed 39 € per month after the trial ends](https://subs.ft.com/spa3_digital?ft-content-uuid=fc94381b-fbc6-4684-93b7-ad9fdec56ee3) [Purchase a Trial subscription for 1 € for 4 weeks You will be billed 65 € per month after the trial ends](/signup?offerId=41218b9e-c8ae-c934-43ad-71b13fcb4465&ft-content-uuid=fc94381b-fbc6-4684-93b7-ad9fdec56ee3)

No heir has ever spent as long waiting to accede the throne. The future of the monarchy is in his hands – and he faces many tricky questions.

It has become a loathe-hate relationship: he does not like the media and treats it with disdain and it doesn’t like him, for his pomposity and superciliousness. But that may be a minor difficulty compared with that of the Commonwealth, whose countries Charles and other members of the royal family have visited so regularly for many years. It just about managed to bless Charles and Camilla’s marriage in 2005 but it has long finessed its privileged, jealously guarded position and will of course conduct the coronation albeit this time with the participation of other faith groups. It never seems to have occurred to him that it might have increased his grasp of the realities of daily life for his future subjects and accordingly he has never really stepped outside the gilded life of large estates and a retinue of servants. It is clearly what Charles has always wanted and as the wife of the sovereign she is rightly queen. Poundbury, his model village in Dorset, bears all the hallmarks of a vanity project, subjecting ordinary folk to the sort of experiment in cramped social living that he would not dream of for himself. He has sat, uncomfortably, on the cusp of the monarchy’s modernisation project: the first heir to the throne to receive an education at school, with his contemporaries. He is the oldest as well as the longest-waiting heir to the throne and Prince of Wales. But since Charles is a more complicated, difficult and reserved man than modern celebrity allows, his popularity is decidedly limited: he is not loved or even liked much, nor particularly admired or respected, and this is a very great handicap to overcome in his new role. Keeping up with the times and adapting to them has been the hallmark of this royal dynasty’s success and, unless he does so, he and the monarchy are sunk. It is a soap opera at which much of the world have been observers, so much so that, like all the best reality television characters, most people have an opinion on what Charles is like. How he handles his reign will shape the future of the monarchy – and, indeed, determine whether it has one at all.