King Charles schedules US visit

King Charles III will head to the United States on Monday, with transatlantic tensions over the Iran war and the Epstein scandal’s long shadow threatening to intrude on the landmark visit.

Both Buckingham Palace and the British government have said that the four-day trip will honour the historic relationship between the two countries, as the US marks 250 years of independence.

Charles’s first US state visit as monarch comes at the request of the UK government and President Donald Trump and will be made with Queen Camilla, according to the palace.

However, the American leader's war with Iran has created a rare rift between London and Washington, leading to significant controversy.

Trump has repeatedly lambasted British Prime Minister Keir Starmer over his war opposition, alongside his government’s immigration and energy policies.

“This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with,” Trump grumbled in March, adding the so-called special relationship had changed. The American leader has also mocked the perceived state of Britain’s armed forces, of which the king is commander-in-chief.

In turn, Starmer has stepped up his public criticism of the war, while stressing the breadth and depth of UK-US ties in defending the state visit. In April YouGov found 48 per cent of Britons support cancelling it.

“Often what the monarchy is able to do, through the bonds that they build, is reach through the decades in a situation like this,” Starmer told MPs when asked why the trip was going ahead.

Trump, a vocal admirer of the royals whose mother was Scottish, told the BBC on Thursday that the visit could absolutely help repair relations, praising the king as fantastic.

Charles, 77, showcased his diplomatic skills during Trump’s state visit to Britain last September, with Royal Holloway University of London monarchy expert Craig Prescott noting he is generally excellent at navigating such occasions.

Prescott mentioned that the independence anniversary provided a useful ‘get out’ for the British side to argue the trip is not about Keir Starmer and Donald Trump.

But he acknowledged it was that ‘little bit closer to politics than usual', and Charles would likely address the very ‘big elephant in the room’ in a coded way in his speech given on Tuesday to the US Congress.

The palace informed that he is the first British monarch to address Congress since his mother, the late queen Elizabeth II, in 1991, and he will mark the two countries’ shared history and deep ties.

Prescott predicted that Charles might refer to the fluctuating nature of the special relationship over time, arguing that he has proven to be a better speaker than his mother.

But Graham Smith, of the anti-monarchy campaign group Republic, argued that the king will go through the rituals without offering anything of substance.

“The only critical thing about this pointless trip is how Trump behaves,” he wrote on X.

Meanwhile, the scandal around late US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein threatens to encroach on the highly choreographed tour.

Charles has faced a major crisis over the friendship his brother Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as prince Andrew, had with the late billionaire, who died in prison in 2019.

New revelations about their links intensified the longstanding controversy after Andrew's mid-February arrest.