Palace not commenting on Queen’s health
Silence fuelling rumours she has COVID
Does the Queen have COVID? It is a simple question to which, in the eyes of Buckingham Palace, there can be no simple answer.
On the one hand, there is an expectation that the nation would be told if its Head of State were temporarily unable to carry out her usual duties. On the other, there are sensitivities over the medical privacy of a great-grandmother aged nearly 96 having to endure her recent ill health being pored over by a curious public.
While the Prince of Wales said he had tested positive for the virus for a second time on Thursday, moments before he was due to arrive in Winchester for a day of public engagements, the Queen’s aides have not offered any such clarity.
The Queen saw the prince less than 48 hours before his positive test, so he would have been infectious when they had tea at Windsor Castle.
Palace sources have said only that the Queen has not shown any symptoms of coronavirus yet. They refuse to confirm whether she has taken a test, let alone provide its result.
Citing medical privacy, they plan to update the public only when there is “something to say.”
Taken at face value, most would assume Her Majesty is testing regularly. At the very least, she will feel obliged to tell those who have seen her — Boris Johnson, who attended Windsor Castle for an in-person audience; her closest aides and household staff — whether they, too, were inadvertently put at risk.
With Omicron proving mild for most, and the Queen fully vaccinated and boosted, there may be little cause for alarm. Yet palace determination not to provide a “running commentary” on what is a newsworthy matter is causing disquiet.
Only a matter of months ago, Nicholas Witchell, the BBC’S veteran royal correspondent, was moved to complain that the public “weren’t given the complete picture” after it emerged the Queen had spent a night in hospital for “preliminary tests” after falling unwell shortly after a public engagement. Then the news broke on the front of a tabloid newspaper.
In November 2020, it was disclosed the Duke of Cambridge had contracted COVID the previous April, with the public never told for fear of causing alarm. He had fallen ill not long after his father’s first bout of COVID, but did not release the news via his press office as “there were important things going on” and he didn’t want to worry anyone.
On Friday, as the Duke flew home from Dubai, Kensington Palace similarly declined to reveal whether the Duchess of Cambridge had taken a COVID test after spending the day with the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall six days before her father-in-law’s diagnosis. If palace aides are so minded, the Queen — safe in a bubble of discreet friends and aides — could test positive for the virus and the public would never know.
But while decency dictates that they should not be drawn into fuelling lurid stories about the Queen’s health, the public cares. Just as they would like to know whether their own mother or grandmother was suffering a cold, they will not be able to rest easy until the Queen is out of the COVID danger zone.
The Queen and her aides may not want to worry anyone. But the public, holding their collective breath for Her Majesty as she begins her Platinum Jubilee year, are worrying nonetheless.