Why King Charles and Queen Camilla’s popularity is growing

The regal couple aren't the first to experience an uptick in popularity after years of being sandwiched between a beloved matriarch and a charismatic younger generation

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A theory on why King Charles and Queen Camilla’s popularity is growing

A tweet marking Queen Camilla’s engagement at Salisbury Cathedral on February 8, 2024

On Thursday, weather conditions described as “treacherous” meant that Queen Camilla couldn’t take a helicopter from Sandringham to a long-standing engagement in Salisbury. So she decided to travel by road — meaning a six-hour round-trip through what forecasts warned was sleet, rain, and snow. “She did not want to let down the King, having assured him that she would continue with her schedule of official engagements,” a source told the Telegraph.

The concert at Salisbury Cathedral to honour three local charities was a hit. As was Queen Camilla, who garnered positive press, including from People, the American celebrity magazine.

That day, YouGov released new polling data on the royal family that showed King Charles’s popularity was at 66 percent, up three points since the last poll three weeks earlier, while Queen Camilla’s was up two points to 50 percent.

The royals aren’t ones to look closely at minor changes to polling; nor am I. But what I find interesting is the overall trend in recent years. Look at the line charts below — popularity for both King Charles and Queen Camilla bottomed out in November 2017, then began to rise. Where the line starts to get more jagged near the right-hand side is roughly the start of this decade. Now, keeping that in mind, look at the first noticeable dip for the couple in that jagged area for the couple — that’s March 2021, when Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, aired royal dirty laundry in that famous Oprah special.

Since then, their popularity has fluctuated but the trend line is most definitely up. And that marks a big change from the stagnancy of how people perceived them in the earlier 2010s.

Why the recent improvement in the King and Queen’s popularity? I have a theory that I’ve been mulling over for years, as well as asking for the opinions of fellow royal watchers. I believe that the current growth in popularity being enjoyed by King Charles III roughly tracks with what occurred to his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, two decades earlier.