Jonathan Freedland

But it was something.

I think he probably could have gone a little bit further, actually.

Well, they're going to visit Virginia, which is obviously where a lot of this history happened, the colonial period and the independence war.

And then he's going to go to New York, various commitments there.

Unclear whether he's going to have a one on one meeting with the mayor of New York.

It would be fascinating if that did happen.

You know, the self-described socialist mayor of New York, Zoran Mamdani, figure of the left, increasingly the global left.

You could imagine the thinking behind that if it did happen, which would be, look, he's met Donald Trump, who is obviously for people back home in Britain, for many of them, a hate figure associated with the right, with the authoritarian right, nationalist populist right.

How do we balance that?

Well, what better way than by meeting with a figure of the left in Zoran Mamdani so that he would be able to come back if this were to go ahead and say, look, this was not a party political thing or an ideologically one-sided thing.

I met figures from the left and right.

In the United States, the palace are very careful to make sure the king maintains this sort of equipoise between left and right, that he's just a figure at the center as they see it.

And that you could imagine that being the thinking.

I think one other subtext of this whole visit, of course, we're talking about repairing the relationship between Britain and America.

We talked about Starmer and Trump.

The other dynamic at play here is about Charles and his mother, that Charles for a long time was just waiting to take over this job and inevitably was therefore in the shadow of Queen Elizabeth II.

This visit and the rave reviews he's getting, the ovations, the laughter at the White House,

speech will make him feel that he has, I think, at last emerged as a big figure in his own right, the equal in terms of just doing the job of his mother in terms of just this diplomatic and smoothing out ruffled feathers.

I think this will be a big moment for him.

He's 77.