What
Britain wants from King Charles’ trip to Trumpland
The
monarch’s fence-mending visit to the U.S. this week is the result of months of
strategizing at the highest levels of the U.K. government.
April 27,
2026 4:00 am CET
By Dan
Bloom and Esther Webber
LONDON —
When King Charles III lands in the U.S. on Monday, his aides will be carrying a
heavy ring binder lined with thick, textured paper.
Among
reams of timings, briefings and biographies will likely be a condensed list of
key objectives, the result of months of planning with the British government,
expanded upon in the margins with handwritten scribbles from the monarch’s red
felt-tip pen.
It will
not have been easy to write.
Trump had
already strained his relationship with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to
the limit with volleys against the prime minister’s stances on the Iran war,
immigration and oil and gas drilling; some U.K. politicians called for Charles
not to go at all. Now, his visit will take place amid heightened security
tensions after a shooting at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Charles
will likely touch on the shooting in his speech to a joint session of Congress
on Tuesday, according to a royal aide not authorized to speak publicly. The
king has poured work into it personally. While reports have suggested the
speech will last 20 minutes, two other people familiar with the planning said
they expected it to run to about half an hour — far exceeding the 12-minute
speech his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, gave during a U.S. visit in 1991. “You
can say a lot in 30 minutes in Congress,” said one of the two people cited
above.
But as
with all royal visits, Charles’ more contentious messages will be delivered
mostly in code, the real politics simmering behind the scenes.
Both
sides are at pains to stress this trip is merely a 250th-birthday present to
the U.S., and there will be no substantive announcements. The Trump
administration has assured British counterparts they can expect little focus on
policy, despite the president holding an Oval Office meeting with Charles — the
U.K. head of state, though not the head of government — on Tuesday.
Yet in
conversations with POLITICO, 15 current and former U.K. and U.S. officials
familiar with the process — many of them granted anonymity to discuss it —
painted a vivid picture of a visit heavily planned and guided by the British
state with political and policy implications that run deep.
Leadership
threats by Starmer’s own party have also raised questions among U.K. officials
about how far Charles should keep himself — in Trump’s eyes — distinct from the
prime minister who requested he go.
In all,
the bar for success is now so low in Britain’s eyes that the aim is quite
simple: Mend some fences and make Trump smile.
‘That
didn’t happen by accident’
Monarchs
pick their interventions with care, while Trump seems to careen wildly into
his. Both those factors will limit Charles’ room to influence the president.
One
person familiar with the preparations said: “There is a feeling that the king
can probably advance maybe one issue, so the question is what that issue will
be.”
A prime
candidate is the war in Ukraine, from which the president has spent months
distracted by the upcoming midterm elections and the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war
with Iran.
The
grinding conflict between Kyiv and Moscow sits in the center of the Venn
diagram of British diplomatic aims that are also close to the king’s heart. “It
is the thing the king really cares about,” said the same person quoted above.
“More than tech or the other elements of the relationship.”
(The
royal aide quoted earlier in this story responded: “I would be very wary of
speculative assumptions about the king’s supposed views on any given matter,
which usually owe more to feverish gossip in Westminster saloon bars than the
inner thoughts of the sovereign.”)
The
monarch also appears likely to emphasize Britain’s commitment to the two
nations’ defense ties — which include NATO moves to fend off Russia in the
Arctic — as the president questions the alliance’s future. A trip to Arlington
Cemetery is on the agenda, and Starmer’s official spokesperson said Friday:
“We’ve got one of the most important security and defense relationships, if not
the closest that the world has ever seen.”
While
British officials downplayed a leaked Pentagon email Friday suggesting the U.S.
could review its recognition of U.K. sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, any
mention of it by Trump during the visit would put rocket boosters under the
story. And there are deeper questions about defense — among them, how quickly
Britain will accelerate toward its target (influenced by Trump) of spending 3.5
percent of GDP on defense by 2035.
Former
NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said last week that the future
relationship with the U.S. would depend on Britain showing it is moving
decisively toward the 3.5 percent goal. “Discussions I’ve had since last week
indicate that that is the direction that they’re going in,” he told the Chatham
House foreign affairs think tank in London.
Charles
will have Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper by his side for almost the entire
four-day visit, including traveling on the same plane. She plans to break off
from the royal delegation to discuss hard politics with U.S. Secretary of State
Marco Rubio on Tuesday.
The
king’s messaging is a bit subtler. During Trump’s U.K. state visit in
September, First Lady Melania Trump wore a yellow dress while Queen Camilla
wore a blue dress, the colors of the Ukrainian flag. “That didn’t happen by
accident,” said a person with knowledge of that visit.
The
royals’ style is “show don’t tell,” added Simon Case, who has held jobs in both
wings of the British establishment — first as Prince William’s private
secretary, then as head of the U.K. civil service. He added: “Royal visits use
symbolism and images to communicate meaning more than they use words.”
Sometimes
Charles’ more potent messages will hide in plain sight, though.
During
the state banquet for Trump in September, the king praised the AUKUS submarine
partnership between the U.S., U.K. and Australia as setting a “benchmark for
innovative and vital collaboration.” A month later Trump — whose administration
had reviewed the pact — said it was going “full steam ahead.” The first person
familiar with the preparations said it had been a deliberate — and therefore
successful — intervention designed to nudge the president.
Topics
best avoided
There’s
one thing that unites Trump, Starmer and Charles — none of them want to talk
about the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Police
are investigating the king’s brother, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and former
U.K. Ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson over claims each of them separately
passed sensitive material to Epstein. (Both deny wrongdoing.)
Buckingham
Palace has rebuffed calls from campaigners for the king or Queen Camilla — a
campaigner on violence against women and girls — to meet Epstein’s victims on
their visit.
Hours
before Charles’ speech to Congress, the U.K. parliament will hear for the first
time from Starmer’s former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, who resigned in
February having previously pushed for Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador.
Starmer appointed Mandelson despite knowing of his past friendship with
Epstein, and Downing Street has struggled to contain the scandal that will
continue to play out this week in Westminster hearings while the king is in
Washington.
The issue
dearest to Charles’ heart — the environment — is also likely to be firmly off
the table. The king used a Commonwealth summit in 2024 to call for action to
combat the “existential threat of climate change.” It is hard to imagine him
repeating those words this week.
And it is
difficult to picture the king holding forth about Trump’s new White House
ballroom, though his zeal for preserving traditional architectural styles is
well-known. Charles once sank a proposed extension to London’s National Gallery
by calling it a “monstrous carbuncle.”
‘Cover to
re-engage on trade’
There
will be plenty of real policy machinations behind the public pomp.
Starmer’s
Special Envoy to the U.S. Varun Chandra is joining the royal visit, three
people familiar with planning said, and was due to fly out ahead of the king on
Sunday.
Chandra,
a former finance executive and political special adviser in Downing Street, has
made regular trips to the U.S. in an attempt to unstick the details of two
separate deals on technology and trade that Starmer and Trump struck last year.
The
“economic prosperity deal” promised to lower U.S. tariffs on cars, aerospace
and steel in exchange for beef and bioethanol access, but despite some progress
in areas such as pharma tariffs, key elements of the original deal remain
unfulfilled.
The
separate tech agreement also hangs in the balance. Trump threatened on Friday
to impose a “big tariff” in retaliation for the U.K.’s digital services tax,
which affects several large U.S. tech firms.
Charles
is vanishingly unlikely to unstick any details, and nor would he intend to. The
long list of reasons includes that technical negotiations are ill-suited to
subtle royal diplomacy and that Charles’ priorities lie elsewhere. “I just
can’t imagine for a moment that the king is going to start talking about
trade,” said Duncan Edwards, CEO of BritishAmerican Business, a transatlantic
networking group.
All is
not lost, however; Edwards predicted that Chandra and Christian Turner,
Britain’s new Ambassador to the U.S., “will be absolutely using the cover that
the king gives to re-engage on trade,” including once Charles is safely home.
Both
sides will be “trying to move ahead on certain issues,” added one U.S.
official.
The same
U.S. official stressed that mending fences will be “first and foremost” in
people’s minds. A former senior No. 10 official added: “My priority would be to
stem the bleeding and ensure that when Trump is phoned up by random journalists
in the middle of the night he stops setting these red lines for the prime
minister.”
‘Deliberately
shrouded in mystery’
All the
planning happens under the thin pretense that royal visits are all the business
of Buckingham Palace. The reality is that Charles’ visit is happening on
government advice, and has been planned for months by Whitehall and palace
aides in a succession of private briefings and meetings.
A “royal
visits committee” comprising royal staff, Downing Street, the Cabinet Office,
the Foreign Office and Department for Business and Trade looks through hundreds
of options. “Once they agree a place they start going through logistics,
objectives and deliverables,” said a second person familiar with the
preparations.
Turner
met U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to discuss the visit last week, while
Cooper met U.S. Ambassador to the U.K. Warren Stephens.
“It’s
deliberately shrouded in mystery,” added the senior former No. 10 official
quoted above. “It’s not meant to look like it’s all planned out by the
government with the palace, but it is.”
The king
receives notes in a red box, like those given to U.K. ministers, and — although
he has been involved personally in writing his speech to Congress — circulated
copies of it to a wide list of government recipients well in advance.
The final
preparations have been touched by the recent drama in the Starmer government.
The chair of the royal visits committee is the most senior civil servant at the
Foreign Office. Until April 16, this was Olly Robbins, but Starmer sacked him
in a row over the vetting process for Mandelson.
Robbins’
stand-in Nick Dyer has taken over as committee chair and has been “heavily
engaged” in the planning in recent weeks, a third person familiar with the
preparations said.
The
lion’s share of work in the final days, though, has been done by Turner and his
team in the British Embassy in Washington D.C. along with Starmer’s Principal
Private Secretary Dan York-Smith, who is responsible for liaising with the
palace.
The
person familiar with royal visits quoted above said York-Smith will deal with
the most “tactical and immediate” communication, such as how Charles should
respond if a nightmare scenario arose — such as Trump mentioning the Falklands
in person.
British
officials liaise in turn with the U.S. Embassy in London, which recently
acquired a new Deputy Head of Mission, Robert Thomas. Two people familiar with
the planning described him as someone who can get things done and argued it was
a sign that the institutional relationship was in a good place, whatever Trump
might say on Truth Social.
Long live
the King … even if Keir is gone
Tensions
remain not just between the two leaders, but between Starmer and his own MPs —
who are mulling an attempt to topple him in the wake of major elections on May
7. If he is removed, a new leader would have to start again in trying to butter
up Trump.
That has
raised a question among some people in British foreign policy: How much should
it be emphasized to the president that Starmer and the king are two very
different people, ensuring Charles can remain a bridge to Trump if the PM is
removed?
Case said
the aim of the visit will be to “rise above politics, and remind everyone that
this relationship is far bigger than just the immediate relationship between
any president and prime minister.”
Michael
Martins, an associate fellow at the British Foreign Policy Group, added: “Trump
has been relatively clear when it comes to the criticism he has for the U.K.,
it is directed at Starmer for the most part, while his warm words are reserved
for the king.”
It is not
only about threats to Starmer’s job. Keeping the separation could also achieve
the best scenario for Britain from this week’s visit: smiles, praise and no
blow-ups. Whether the president will ever return to his bromance with Starmer
after the PM refused to join his Iran war is another question.
An Ipsos
poll of 1,072 Brits last week found 41 percent believe Charles’ visit will make
no difference to the U.S.-U.K. relationship and 10 percent believe it will make
it worse.
Olivia
O’Sullivan, the director of the UK in the World program at Chatham House, said:
“The royal family has been one of the assets the U.K. can reliably deploy to
get some surface warm words, but what we’re seeing is it doesn’t necessarily
paper over bigger strategic divergences.”
But at
least Britain has that ability to paper over the cracks at all. In other words,
at least it isn’t France or Germany.
“The U.K.
is in an enviable position in that we have two equally powerful statesmen to
deploy,” said Sophia Gaston, a senior research fellow at the Centre for
Statecraft and National Security at King’s College London. “No other ally has
the advantages it brings in terms of amplifying certain issues, or the ability
to smooth over tensions in the political relationship.”
For
evidence of this, one need look no further than Trump’s first state to Britain
in 2019.
U.K.
officials tried and failed to put together a “best of British” program to show
the president. They even discussed bringing a military display to bring to
Trump wherever he was, recalled the former senior No. 10 official quoted above.
“It kept
getting rejected,” they said. “It transpired that all he wanted to do with his
diary was executive time and seeing the Queen.”
Smile and
wave!
All these
factors will make the king’s visit one of the trickiest of his reign so far.
One
government official said the word inside Whitehall is “the king is not keen at
all to go.” While even officials themselves can find it hard to divine the
truth from rumor, the monarch’s allies have previously found ways of making
their displeasure known. When the royal visits committee decided against
sending Charles to the COP27 climate summit in 2022, quotes from a “royal
source” appeared in the Sunday Times newspaper making clear that he was not
attending on the government’s advice.
Even if
the king does not enjoy something personally, though, allies say he always
pours his energy into any trip that he sees as his duty. One person familiar
with royal visits said: “He doesn’t like being caught in the middle of
politics. On the flip side, he’s fucking good at it.”
After
decades of campaigning on the environment and other issues, the 77-year-old is
also more used to the cut and thrust of politics than his mother, who was the
apolitical monarch from the age of 25. He travelled early to address
politicians in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
“His
court is considerably more comfortable [than the late Queen’s] with being
harnessed as an instrument of diplomacy,” said the first person familiar with
the preparations quoted above: “My understanding is it’s something he has
impressed upon William” as his heir.
The royal
aide quoted above said: “The palace recognises the visit is not without
complexity but you shouldn’t lose sight of the fact it is also an incredible
opportunity, for the nation and for the king himself.
“This, in
its most literal sense, is what he was born to do. And he will do it with all
the wisdom, experience, warmth and diplomatic skill he has accrued over a
lifetime doing exactly this sort of thing, and in the best interests of the
nation that he serves.”
Sophie
Inge and Annabelle Dickson contributed reporting from London.
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