Behind-the-scenes Harry and Meghan drama threatening the King’s American state visit… extremely awkward topic Trump’s agreed NOT to mention… and ‘private grief’ Charles is hiding from the world

The ballroom may not be ready for the King’s visit next week, but the elephant that would have stood in it has shown up right on time. Five of them actually. 

Andrew. Mandelson. Epstein and, in a different way, Prince Harry and Meghan.

King Charles III will do his best not speak about any of them while in Washington DC, New York or Virginia at the invitation of President Trump; publicly at least.

That is the point. It is, in fact, dare I say it the hub of the story.

On paper, the visit is upbeat. ‘Peppy’ even. There will be several forced smiles at photo ops. Even the occasional genuine one.

His Majesty King Charles III lands for the 250th anniversary of America’s severance from his great-great-great-grandfather King George III (the so-called ‘Mad King’) – awkward, as everyone has politely agreed not to mention.

He will address a joint session of Congress, the first British monarch to do so since his mother in 1991. There will be speeches, a state ‘dinner’ not ‘banquet’ (that is for the Brits). In short, there will be the usual choreography, in the usual key.

Underneath it, however, lurks one question – one that Americans keep asking and nobody in London seems willing to answer.

Why hasn’t he said something? Why hasn’t the King given a televised statement about his disgraced brother, Andrew? Simple answer he cannot. His press release statement was wishy washy but necessary.

And people want more. Not a line at the foot of a palace press release. Not a sentence about the law taking its course – a real statement. The kind an American president gives on the South Lawn with the helicopter whirring behind him. About his brother. About Jeffrey Epstein. About the victims. About whether he, personally, is sorry.

He has not, because he cannot.

This gets lost in the transatlantic crossing. In America, the head of state is also the head of government: one podium, one voice. Silence in that system reads as guilt, or evasion, or both.

Britain runs differently. The King does not speak for the government – that is his Prime Minister’s job, and His Majesty’s Government’s, currently held by Keir Starmer, not by the man on the throne. Charles represents the country. He does not run it.

That is the small part of the answer. The bigger part is the courts.

In England and Wales, every criminal prosecution is brought in the King’s name: Rex versus the defendant. The Sovereign is formally the prosecutor – which means he cannot give evidence in his own courts, cannot be subpoenaed into them and cannot meet the alleged victims of a live investigation, because a kind word could wreck the case brought in his name on their behalf.

Americans have seen this happen; they have never had it explained.

In 2002, the English courts tried Paul Burrell, Princess Diana’s former butler, for theft. The trial collapsed mid-hearing because the late Queen suddenly remembered a conversation with him that would have cleared him but she could not be called as a witness.

The prosecution folded on the spot. This wasn’t a scandal. It was the system working as designed.

So, when the King offers only a formulaic – the law must take its course – he is not stonewalling. He is doing the only thing a Sovereign is permitted to do while his brother sits in a live criminal file. A king who speaks about a live prosecution is a king interfering with one.

Which brings us back to those elephants.

Andrew first. On February 19, his sixty-sixth birthday, Thames Valley Police took Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor – that is his name now, his princely title stripped last October – to Aylsham police station in Norfolk and held him eleven hours. He was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. Not sex crimes. The distinction matters, because American coverage has blurred the two into a single smudge.

His arrest follows the disclosure of emails about trade in the Epstein files. They suggest that Andrew, while serving as Britain’s official trade envoy, fed Jeffrey Epstein: itineraries, investment briefings, a paper on Afghanistan. The Virginia Giuffre allegations are a separate file, still being assessed.

Four days after Andrew was driven home from Aylsham, the Metropolitan Police came for Peter Mandelson – until last September, Britain’s Ambassador to Washington.

Twice a Cabinet minister, a peer, and, across forty years of Labour politics, known as the Prince of Darkness. He is under arrest on suspicion of the same offense as Andrew following allegations that he leaked material to Epstein while Business Secretary. He has resigned from the Lords and been removed from the Privy Council. Neither men have been charged and both deny wrongdoing. But the King cannot say a word about either.

One fact to sit with, because it is why the American fury has not cooled: Eight years after Jeffrey Epstein was pulled off a plane at Teterboro, exactly one person has been convicted and jailed over his sex-trafficking ring. Ghislaine Maxwell who is currently serving twenty years in a federal facility. No accomplices, no enablers, no clients – in either country. No visiting monarch can fix that. It is the weather he walks into.

Which brings us to the other American question. Why won’t Andrew testify before Congress?

He cannot be made to. British subjects, on British soil, do not answer to American subpoenas. Congressional testimony is voluntary for foreign nationals abroad, and no lawyer worth a retainer is going to deliver a client under domestic investigation into a hearing room on Capitol Hill.

And, for the avoidance of further doubt, there will be no ambush. What happened to Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office last year – cameras rolling, voices raised, the Vice President publicly filleting him on live television – cannot happen to Charles.

Zelensky is an elected head of government who was there to argue a case. Charles is a head of state there to represent a country. He does not negotiate trade or defend policy.

That leaves the fourth and fifth elephants – the saddest of all, Harry and Meghan.

Harry chose an unannounced visit to Kyiv to lecture the president on the eve of his father’s state visit. When asked if he thought Harry’s advice – to end the war in Ukraine – was ‘appropriate,’ Trump answered with a smirk and a swipe at the couple. ‘How’s he doing?’ he asked. ‘How’s his wife?’ He added that Harry certainly wasn’t speaking for Britain.

The late Queen feared exactly this – a freelancing son cutting across the Crown at the worst possible hour. Was it wise? No. But Harry isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. 

He and Meghan will not be in Washington, of course – nor should they be – but their absence travels with the delegation. Archie is six. Lilibet turns five this June. They are growing up in Montecito with no memory of their grandfather, and every month that passes is a month lost.

That those two children may reach double figures without ever sitting in his kitchen at Highgrove, or walking the gardens with him, or hearing him murmur to the plants as he does, is a private grief no amount of diplomatic choreography can touch.

It will not be mentioned at the banquet. It will sit in the room all week.

The man is seventy-seven. He has cancer. Treatment continues, the good days outnumber the bad for now, and his staff handle the diary with a care that was not required a year ago. None of it will show in Washington. The tailoring is too good. The training runs too deep.

Truthfully, he does not want to be on this plane. A man his age, in his condition, would rather be at Highgrove with his secateurs. But the Foreign Office asked, His Majesty’s Government agreed and a king who is also a constitutional monarch does not decline a President. He signs the paperwork. He boards the plane. He does the work.

This is the part Americans have not worked out. It is not a job; it is a condition.

He was raised to it from the nursery, shaped by his grandmother and his mother and three-quarters of a century of waiting in a queue of one, and will do it until his last breath. The discipline is absolute. It is who he was born to be.

His grandfather did it too, in easier weather.

In June 1939, on a porch in Hyde Park, New York, President Franklin Roosevelt served George VI his first hot dog. The King asked how to eat it. Roosevelt, never a man to overcomplicate a sausage, told him: ‘Very simple. Push it into your mouth and keep pushing it until it is all gone.’ The King did exactly that, washed it down with a beer, and went back for a second.

What looked like a party trick that afternoon helped hold the West together through the worst years the century had to offer.

This week is harder. Two live criminal investigations. A fractured family. A country of Epstein survivors wanting what cannot yet be given them. And a king who cannot say the words Americans most want to hear.

He will say less than people want. He will mean more than they know.

Robert Jobson’s latest book is The Windsor Legacy, published by Pegasus/Simon & Schuster in the USA.