King Charles was sleepwalking into a diplomatic nightmare on Friday, after Donald Trump launched another vicious attack on the U.K., prompting new calls for the king to abandon his state visit to the United States just days before it was due to kick off.
The latest insult to British honor was a leaked Pentagon email that suggested a review of British ownership of the Falkland Islands to punish the U.K. for not supporting Trump’s war in Iran.
The U.K.’s Foreign Office has made clear that the visit will go ahead, while a palace source also told the Daily Beast that there was no question the visit would be abandoned and that the king would invoke the old royal mantra of “keep calm and carry on.”
But the level of insult involved underlines the danger of the trip for the king, because Trump’s maneuvering on the Falklands is built on the back of British war dead.
The 74-day Falklands War was fought between April 2 and June 14, 1982, after Argentina—then in the hands of a far-right junta government—invaded the British overseas territory in the South Atlantic, hundreds of miles off the coast of Argentina, and with a population fiercely loyal to the British crown. It had been British since 1765 and had no indigenous population. Margaret Thatcher, then the U.K. prime minister, sent a naval task force more than 8,000 miles to retake the islands, making it the last major overseas war solely fought by the U.K.; Ronald Reagan’s administration stayed firmly out of the dispute. The conflict killed 255 British troops and 649 Argentine military personnel.
Since the war, the islands have remained under British control, although Argentina still claims sovereignty over them, calling them Los Malvinas. The Falklands give Britain a strategic position in the South Atlantic and access routes toward Antarctica.
Sir Ed Davey, the leader of Britain’s third party, the Liberal Democrats, which holds 72 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons, described a leaked Pentagon email indicating that the U.S. support for Britain’s sovereignty over the Falkland Islands could face review due to U.K. opposition to American policy on Iran as “frankly outrageous.”
He urged the cancellation of the king’s state visit scheduled to start Monday, branding Donald Trump an “unreliable, damaging President” who “cannot keep insulting our country.”
While Davey’s comments have no prospect of any impact on the king’s plans, they do accurately reflect a sense of disgust in large swathes of the British population at the prospect of King Charles III’s visit to the U.S.
A poll by YouGov on March 26 found that 49 percent of Britons said Charles should cancel the visit, versus 33 percent who wanted it to go ahead. The figures broadly mirror last year’s sentiment, when 45 percent of Britons thought it was wrong to invite Trump for a September 2025 state visit.
King Charles does not get to choose whether or not to undertake state visits, which occur at the behest of the government. His friends were largely unwilling to speak to the Daily Beast, given the political sensitivities surrounding Friday’s trip.
However, it is no secret that many of his allies fear that, 250 years after the madness of King George helped consolidate U.S. independence, Charles has been unfairly ushered into the madness of Donald Trump’s court by a U.K. government desperate to placate an increasingly unhinged American president.
The government and royal aides have insisted the trip will help cement “deep” transatlantic connections and “shared values.” Still, the reality for Charles is that he can ill-afford to be seen cozying up to a U.S. president now openly reviled in the U.K.
Charles is currently burdened with the worst personal polling numbers of recent decades, presiding over a long-term erosion of support for the institution he embodies, a reality that the largely deferential British media has shown remarkably little appetite for spelling out.
YouGov’s most recent quarterly tracker, published on April 21, has him at 60 percent approval, a figure that sounds respectable until you put it in context. His late mother was at 81 percent in the same poll. Prince William is at 76 percent. His wife, Princess Catherine, is at 75 percent. Princess Anne, who does nothing more glamorous than open village halls, is at 70 percent.
Charles is less popular than all of them, and a full third of the country—34 percent—view him negatively, meaning his net favorability with YouGov has sunk to plus 25, down from plus 33 in December and his lowest since he became king.
The causes are, of course, obvious. Andrew’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein—culminating in his arrest and an ongoing criminal investigation—has done incalculable damage to the monarchy, and Charles’ handling of his brother has been widely perceived as slow and weak, even if the eventual stripping of his titles was the right call.
There is also enormous anger at the king’s unwillingness to remove Harry and Meghan’s titles, which they are now monetizing, in defiance of earlier pacts. The couple is simultaneously trying to reposition themselves as serious public figures, with the most recent example being a speech by Harry in Ukraine in which he criticized the Trump administration for not supporting the country, and invoked the Budapest Memorandum, which the U.S. signed, and was supposed to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial security in return for surrendering its nuclear arsenal.
While many in the U.K. would support the sentiment of Harry’s remarks, there was widespread astonishment at Harry appearing to be unaware or careless of their sensitivity, specifically in the context that the king’s son could be seen as speaking for the U.K. on the eve of the king’s visit.
It was left, ironically, to Donald Trump to clear matters up, telling reporters: “I know one thing, Prince Harry is not speaking for the U.K., that’s for sure. I think I am speaking for the U.K. more than Prince Harry. But I appreciate his advice very much.”
He also quipped: “Prince Harry? How’s he doing? How’s his wife? Please give her my regards.”
Given the controversy, it would be hard, perhaps, to imagine a way to make the king’s day worse, but, somehow, Harry found a way Friday, when he lobbed another bombshell in his father’s direction, effectively daring his ailing father to strip him of his title by announcing that he was still a “working” “member of the royal family” in a TV interview in Ukraine.
Asked in the same interview whether his confrontational challenge to Trump might complicate his father’s state visit, Harry was breezily dismissive.
“No, I don’t think so. Not at all,” he told ITV’s Chris Ship, blithely ignoring the fact that officials have spent months choreographing the Washington trip.
The extraordinary thing is, this trip is already such an omni-disaster, that Harry might just be right.
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