Days after a shooting that apparently targeted President Donald Trump’s administration and sparked fresh concerns about security in the nation’s capital, King Charles III was set Monday to embark on a rare state visit that promised to pit the president’s admiration for British royalty against his fury at the British government.
The long-planned encounter had been intended to showcase close Anglo-American relations 250 years after the Declaration of Independence. Instead, it comes in the middle of one of the sharpest fights between Washington and London in generations, as Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer tussle over the president’s war on Iran and whether either side still wants to hold on to the close cooperation of the past.
Preparations for the event were shadowed by Saturday’s shooting at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner, which forced the evacuation of Trump, most of his Cabinet and hundreds of journalists, officials and celebrities.
On Sunday, Buckingham Palace confirmed in a statement that the ikng and Queen Camilla would go ahead with their visit. The royal tour is scheduled to last four days, which officials had reassessed in light of Saturday’s shooting.
“The King and Queen are most grateful to all those who have worked at pace to ensure this remains the case and are looking forward to the Visit getting underway tomorrow,” the statement said.
British officials hope their monarch can paper over the tensions between Washington and London with some pomp, using his royal mystique to remind Trump of the advantages of holding close to the kingdom, his mother’s birthplace. The king does not explicitly engage in politics, nor does he grant interviews — a level of discretion that impressed some White House officials as they prepared for the encounter on behalf of a president who routinely takes calls on his cellphone from journalists.
Trump has taken aim at Starmer over his reluctance to support the war and Britain’s initial ban on U.S. planes’ using its air bases for the attack on Iran. He has drawn a sharp line between the king and his prime minister.
“I look forward to the dinner,” Trump said last week, referring to the king as “a friend of mine.”
“We’re really looking forward to it, we’ve spoken and we’re going to have a great time,” he said.
By contrast, the president said of Starmer last month: “This is not Winston Churchill we’re dealing with.” Britain, he said, was no longer “the Rolls-Royce of allies.”
British officials say their hands were tied at the outset of the war by laws barring preemptive attacks, but that they were freed to assist after Iran retaliated.
Many British policymakers remain skeptical about the war and are frustrated about the resulting spike in energy prices. Among the British public, the war is hugely unpopular, with the country’s economy badly hurt by war-related inflation and turmoil in financial markets.
But the British government hopes the visit can be a chance to reset with a king who floats above politics, a symbol of his nation who answers to no voter.
“Despite our small disagreement in 1776 and the fact that we burnt down the White House — I think, only once, it has now become one of the most enduring alliances in history,” said British Ambassador Christian Turner, who will shepherd his monarch through the visit. The trip will include a garden party at the ambassador’s grand Washington residence, an Oval Office visit and a state dinner at the White House. Charles will address a joint meeting of Congress, the second British monarch to do so after his mother in 1991.
British leaders are simultaneously grateful for Charles’s goodwill with Trump — and the president’s starry-eyed admiration for the king — and anxious about what the president might say while standing next to him.
Trump’s relationship with Starmer has plummeted from collegial to contemptuous since the Feb. 28 start of the war. Last year, during the president’s September state visit to Windsor Castle, Trump called Starmer “a very good man” and praised what he described as the strong bond between the two countries.
It was the payoff to what seemed like a winning strategy. From the beginning of Trump’s second term, Starmer had bet on a policy of disciplined deference — critiquing White House policy but never the man in the Oval Office, shrugging off the taunts and banking the goodwill.
For the first 14 months, it worked. When Trump slapped 10 percent tariffs on most of Europe, Britain negotiated a more favorable bilateral deal, winning meaningful concessions on cars, steel and aerospace.
But Starmer’s game, whether checkers or four-dimensional chess, was always against a president who sometimes flips the entire board. With the war on Iran, the goodwill disappeared.
In London, the decision to proceed with the visit has split opinion. Government officials say there is no upside in snubbing the leader of Britain’s most important ally, however difficult the moment. A person familiar with the deliberations, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk about internal discussions, said Starmer’s team trusts Charles — his instincts formed by generations of aristocratic reserve and honed across decades of carefully anodyne public speaking — to avoid making things worse, even if he cannot make them better.
“He has to go. Not going would be far worse for the relationship,” said a British official familiar with government planning for the trip, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive arrangements.
“You can never tell what this president is going to do or say when you’re standing next to him, but the king has a very good poker face,” the official said.
The opposition is less charitable. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said Starmer had shown “a staggering lack of backbone” in allowing the visit to go ahead, arguing it would hand Trump “another huge diplomatic coup.” A YouGov poll found 48 percent of Britons supported cancelling the visit outright.
And there are broader questions in Britain about the relationship with the United States.
“There’s a sort of feeling in the U.K. that it’s kind of the reverse of 250 years ago, the U.S. treating the U.K. like the colony. The U.K. military is just an appendage for the United States,” said Fiona Hill, who advised Trump on Russia policy during his first term and has advised both U.S. and U.K. governments on security policy.
“Unfortunately, there’s something in that, in the terms of the way that the U.K. military was set up,” which has been to support U.S. overseas military operations rather than to take care of British sovereign interests, Hill said, noting that there is now a move to shift away from that.
Despite all the frustration, she said, Charles still has a chance to capitalize on Trump’s softness for him.
Trump likes to boast that “he’s got this great personal relationship with Putin and Xi,” Hill said, referring to the leaders of Russia and China. “But Charles is of a different category to even them. Yes, they have power and money, but King Charles has a cachet that none of them have, and that Trump would love but hasn’t.”
The visit happens as both Trump and Starmer have been flailing in opinion polls, for some of the same reasons. Starmer is facing a weak economy, a sense he has failed to energize Britons about their future and a mounting scandal over the connections that his first pick for ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson, had to Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier and sex offender.
Ironically, the Iran crisis has helped shore up Starmer’s position. By refusing to bend to Trump’s demand to send ships to the Strait of Hormuz, he cast himself as the statesman who kept Britain out of an unpopular war. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and Tory leader Kemi Badenoch have had to backtrack from initially cheering Trump’s military campaign.
The Mandelson issue, however, is causing mounting damage to him. The prime minister has faced questions over the now-dismissed ambassador’s security vetting, and his defense — that he knew nothing about Mandelson’s initial failure to receive a security clearance — has played into a sense from voters that he does not have a firm grip on his government.
The king will also be navigating his own family scandal in Washington. Charles is resisting calls to meet with victims linked to Epstein, whose ties to the king’s younger brother, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, have roiled the royal family.
“We strongly urge King Charles to meet with us and survivors and hear what we have to say,” the family of Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide last year, wrote in an email to The Washington Post earlier this month. Giuffre said she was forced to have sex with then-Prince Andrew three times when she was 17.
Mountbatten-Windsor is under police investigation over the allegations, and the king has stripped his brother of his royal title and evicted him from his mansion on the grounds of Windsor Castle. But Buckingham Palace officials, citing legal constraints from the criminal investigation, have signaled he would not meet with the families.
Queen Camilla, who regularly speaks against sexual violence and domestic abuse, is expected to meet with activists on those issues during the visit.
Hendrix reported from London. Ted Muldoon and Mariana Alfaro in Washington contributed to this report.
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