# Britons; what are you expecting when Charles becomes King? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 2, 2022, 2:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britons-what-are-you-expecting-when-charles-becomes-king/957061 "2022-01-02T02:19:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 17
**Author:** ![EinsteinsHund](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/einsteinshund/32/8400_2.png) [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2022, 3:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britons-what-are-you-expecting-when-charles-becomes-king/957061/321 "2022-06-27T15:14:48Z")
> [@ISiddiqui](#): > > Someone is not a Marvel fan, I see 😃 . When I think of Paltrow I mostly think of Shakespeare in Love, but I think most people probably see her as Pepper Potts these days. The woo side business is probably a secondary thought. You got me there, I detest super hero movies and avoid them at all costs. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2022, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britons-what-are-you-expecting-when-charles-becomes-king/957061/322 "2022-06-27T16:15:18Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > Gwyneth Paltrow has been making millions of dollars on alternative medicine for years now (which is more than you can say of Charles, who doesn’t run any alternative medicine businesses AFAIK.) Charles _is_ in the supplement business, and his company has been [cited for deceptive claims](https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/mar/21/prince-charles-duchy-originals) about a “detox” product. “Prince Charles’s Duchy Originals company has been forced to amend a campaign promoting two herbal medicines after regulators said healing claims on the firm’s website were misleading.” “Advertisements for Duchy Herbals Echina-Relief Tincture and Duchy Herbals Hyperi-Lift Tincture, which cost £10 per bottle, appeared on the company’s website in January, prompting a complaint from a member of the public who questioned the lack of scientific evidence for the products.” “After seven weeks of deliberation the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, the licensing body responsible for assessing herbal medicines for safety, upheld the complaint prompting the company to change the wording of the adverts and remove the previous claims.” I’m unaware of any other royal who’s gotten into the herbal drug business _and_ secretly lobbied the government to thwart regulation of such products. Any further comments about the quality of your posts are best suited to [another thread](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pit-thread-for-martin-hyde/965045/871). ---
**Author:** ![Mk\_VII](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Mk\_VII](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mk_VII)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2022, 6:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britons-what-are-you-expecting-when-charles-becomes-king/957061/323 "2022-06-27T18:08:38Z")
> [@Gyrate](#): > > Well, how did you become King, then? “The Lady of the Lake-- her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king!” ---
**Author:** ![Frodo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/frodo/32/302_2.png) [@Frodo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frodo)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2022, 6:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britons-what-are-you-expecting-when-charles-becomes-king/957061/324 "2022-06-27T18:18:13Z")
Listen: Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony! ---
**Author:** ![Martin\_Hyde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/47e85d/32.png) [@Martin\_Hyde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martin_Hyde)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2022, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britons-what-are-you-expecting-when-charles-becomes-king/957061/325 "2022-06-27T18:33:42Z")
Mea culpa on the alternative medicine business, while I was aware the Duchy of Cornwall had its hands in several businesses, I was unfamiliar with that. But, I also do not run an Edzard Ernst fan club and live and breathe by every arrow he slings at the Prince of Wales, maybe you do–I am not sure, but you seem highly enamored of him and highly antagonistic towards Charles. However, none of that has much of anything to do with my point–I said the Prince had rehabilitated his image. You started harping on about alternative medicine. Opinion polling is how we assess someone’s image when that person is a public figure, opinion polling shows that Charles’s favorability improved after the mid-90s, due to deliberate PR efforts on his behalf, and that he has maintained positive favorability ever since. I call that “rehabilitated.” You can continue to fume about alternative medicine all you want, that is not going to change the polled opinion of the British people. I’ll also note that it took very little time for me pull up the Wikipedia page on “Duchy Originals”, which is the pass-through entity the Duchy of Cornwall runs to sell organic foods and herbal remedies. It appears that the meat of these companies are ran by two outside corporations–Waitrose (a supermarket chain) and Nelsons (an alternative medicine company), and it is highly unlikely the Prince had any personal decision-making role in the running of the company and certainly not its advertising. I’d remind you that a working Royal like him is doing something like 300 public engagements a year, it seems highly unlikely he is actively involved in running any individual company. It also appears that the Duchy Originals subsidiary is held by the Prince’s Charitable Trust, and any profits it generates goes to the charity’s trust fund, not to Prince Charles personally. A mislabeled consumer product is not actually that uncommon, Proctor & Gamble and Kraft Foods do it all the time, and it is not the end of civilization. The fact you seem to think it is such a significant problem, and it appears your hero Edzard Ernst was big in publicizing the mislabeled Duchy Originals product, it looks like maybe your close affiliation with that figure and the consequent personal animus towards Prince Charles are coloring your ability to actually understand how big a deal something is. Luckily we have the opinion polling, which show that Charles remains in positive favorability. I would wager a significant portion of the British public are unaware of the existence of Duchy Originals, or that it once mislabeled a product and had to correct that label. ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2022, 6:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britons-what-are-you-expecting-when-charles-becomes-king/957061/326 "2022-06-27T18:40:04Z")
You can’t expect to wield _supreme executive power_ just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you! ---
**Author:** ![Frodo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/frodo/32/302_2.png) [@Frodo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frodo)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2022, 7:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britons-what-are-you-expecting-when-charles-becomes-king/957061/327 "2022-06-27T19:17:33Z")
Oh but if I went ‘round sayin’ I was Emperor, just because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2022, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britons-what-are-you-expecting-when-charles-becomes-king/957061/328 "2022-06-27T19:28:51Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > I mostly think of her movies, but I often am on a 10 year delay in terms of movie watching. With the Avengers movies, you can skip ahead five years. ---
**Author:** ![PastTense](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pasttense/32/14550_2.png) [@PastTense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PastTense)\ **Post date:** [June 28, 2022, 2:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britons-what-are-you-expecting-when-charles-becomes-king/957061/329 "2022-06-28T14:45:45Z")
Another issue: > **[Revealed: how Prince Charles pressured ministers to change law to benefit his...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/28/prince-charles-pressured-ministers-change-law-queen-consent)** > > Newly discovered documents show government yielded to heir’s demands amid fears of a constitutional crisis ---
**Author:** ![Martin\_Hyde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/47e85d/32.png) [@Martin\_Hyde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martin_Hyde)\ **Post date:** [June 28, 2022, 2:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britons-what-are-you-expecting-when-charles-becomes-king/957061/330 "2022-06-28T14:56:29Z")
> [@PastTense](#): > > Another issue: > > [Revealed: how Prince Charles pressured ministers to change law to benefit his estate | King Charles III | The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/28/prince-charles-pressured-ministers-change-law-queen-consent) While the specific incident involved is new reporting, this broader issue has been known for some time and has cropped up in a half dozen or so other cases that have leaked as well. A key section from the article: > In a memo on 9 October, Roberts noted: “No special case can be made beyond the fact that the prince has taken a special interest.” He cautioned that ministers’ most important objective was to “ensure that the consent of the Queen and the Prince of Wales to the bill is obtained … their consent is necessary before the bill may be introduced.” I have actually mentioned this in other threads, while the monarch’s input on legislation is largely assumed to be pro forma and never affects policy, this is actually contrary to reality. Legally / constitutionally, without an act of parliament changing the unwritten constitution, the monarch can affect policy. It is broadly assumed that never happens, but there are actually a number of quiet incidents where the Queen’s wishes have been followed, sometimes in ways that the public may not understand were perhaps against the desires of politicians and in theory against the democratic will of the people they represent. I think this (and the other similarly documented situations) where the Queen’s consent has been used to influence policy should be better understood and more widely acknowledged (despite previous reporting on it, I think the public is still fairly ignorant of the issue.) In Britain the monarch still has a lot of de jure legal power and has, factually, leveraged that to her and her family’s advantage in some limited circumstances in a way that doesn’t 100% align with the “popular myth” that the Queen has literally no power at all and purely exists to get her photo taken and to pin medals on people. The bigger issue is that the unelected royals still have this de jure power, the fact they sometimes exercise it should not be too shocking because if you give people the power to do something, it is likely they will do it–and frankly the instances where the Queen has used this power as leverage are more concerning than Charles–as heir Charles only really has authority in this area as a sort of deference to the monarch. ---
**Author:** ![Wrenching\_Spanners](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/ecb155/32.png) [@Wrenching\_Spanners](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wrenching_Spanners)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2022, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britons-what-are-you-expecting-when-charles-becomes-king/957061/331 "2022-06-29T15:34:45Z")
> [@penultima\_thule](#): > > The two time-honoured approaches are to either slaughter the incumbent on the field of battle or be the incumbent’s oldest son. > > Given the results that the paper in ballot box approach have produced recently you’ve gotta admit they have their merits. Is Anthony Albanese really that bad? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britons-what-are-you-expecting-when-charles-becomes-king/957061.md?page=16)