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Is King Charles okay?

Prince William made headlines after a back-slapping meeting with Donald Trump Saturday at Notre Dame, but the British media shied away from asking the more obvious question: why wasn’t King Charles there with the other 35 world heads of state?

Prince William was only confirmed as attending in Charles’ place on Friday. Charles’ aides pointed out that he had already viewed the rebuilt Cathedral, which was destroyed by fire five years ago, on a trip to France earlier this year.

The palace didn’t respond to questions asking if the king’s health, cancer diagnosis and ongoing treatment were factors in his non-appearance.

However, a friend of the king and queen told The Daily Beast that the royal couple wanted to keep things “quiet” to “preserve their health in the run-up to Christmas” after Camilla contracted pneumonia after their long-haul trip to Australia earlier this year. The infection has lingered for several weeks and she is still not back to full strength. The 77-year-old is understood to have contracted viral pneumonia, sometimes referred to as walking pneumonia.

The palace were only partially transparent about Camilla’s condition, referring to it as a “nasty bug” before Camilla went dramatically off-message during the state visit of the Emir of Qatar this week and told guests she had been suffering pneumonia.

The friend said: “His vulnerabilities are well-known but her pneumonia has been a nasty reminder of hers. I think everyone is relieved he didn’t want to go off to Paris and stand in the cold for hours on end. They are very sensibly just keeping things quiet to preserve their health in the run-up to Christmas.”

The event was indeed chilly: Prince William, who stood in for the king, joked with Donald Trump that they needed to warm up as they sat before an open fire for a one-on-one meeting.

“Have you warmed up?” William asked Trump.

“Yes, I’ve warmed up, it was a beautiful ceremony,” Trump replied.

As the two men then settled themselves on yellow sofas in the Salon Jaune, William returned to the theme saying, “We can warm our toes up after the cathedral.”

The meeting marked Trump’s first meeting with a royal since he won re-election. The fact that Charles decided to skip it is, therefore, notable.

William’s aides were quick to argue that the meeting reflected the prince’s evolution as a “global statesman.”

Queen’s son, conscious of “mortality,” says he will spend Christmas with mom

The royal Christmas is slowly taking shape. Tom Parker Bowles, Queen Camilla’s son, who has been doing the rounds of the media in recent weeks to promote his new book Cooking and the Crown, a canter through royal consumption from Camilla’s porridge to the Queen Mother’s gin and Dubonnet, has said he will spend the festive season with his mother at Sandringham.

He told the Telegraph: “For the past 15 years it has been: I go back to my ex-wife’s house, sit in my tracksuit bottoms, go to the pub while the beef’s in, then try to get my children to watch The Wild Geese. Classic. So this would be a bit different.”

Asked who will be there he says: “I genuinely know nothing about it. I know there’s turkey and sprouts and church. And I have to bring a suit and a dinner jacket.”

Asked why he was going this year he said: “My mum said ‘I’d love you to come, I haven’t had Christmas with you for a long time.’ It has been a hell of a two years for them. The older you get, the more conscious you become of mortality, especially with illnesses and the rest of it.”

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Busted

Tom Parker Bowles also has a great story about his meetings with the queen, who, incredibly, he only met twice: “Everyone thinks I knew the late queen, but we only met twice,” he says. “Once when I was eight and I was scared so I curtseyed rather than bowed, and again at my mother’s wedding, where my sister and I went for a fag and heard her voice behind us saying ‘Are you lost?’. [The relationship] was very much once-removed.”

Lost in the post?

The Royalist has searched the mailbox, but in vain. We do not appear to have received a Christmas card from the king and queen.

The card, published this weekend, shows the couple strolling in the Buckingham Palace garden.

It was taken earlier this year, after the king was diagnosed with cancer.

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