Most people understand that in a constitutional monarchy the King has little real power. But he does have influence, perhaps like no other person. What the King says, and how he says it, can exercise a powerful influence on public affairs.
Part of the unpopularity that Prince Charles inspired when he was younger came from the fact that he had particular eccentricities which were peculiar to him and did not really resonate with the people he was going to rule.
As time has gone by, both of those eccentricities have in fact developed political overtones in a way that would have been hard to imagine twenty or thirty years ago. Each of them, as it happens, has become political dynamite, and not in a good way.
