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.
