When the King delivered this year’s traditional Christmas Day speech – the fourth he has now given – he chose to break with convention by delivering it not from the usual surroundings of Buckingham Palace, but from the Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey. It is unfortunate, then, that it is royal-adjacent ladies of quite another kind who are presently on the public’s mind, thanks to the recent revelations that Charles’s younger brother supposedly implored Ghislaine Maxwell to find him ‘new inappropriate friends’ in August 2001: the latest in a series of embarrassing and damaging revelations about the former Prince Andrew’s behaviour that resulted in his being stripped of his royal titles and standing in October.

While the King’s Christmas address is a personal and heartfelt message, there are always deep-seated expectations as to what he will and will not include. And so it proved this year. Andrew and Harry were very much off the table for discussion, but so, perhaps more surprisingly, was any discussion of his health. Many........

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