LONDON — In the world of diplomatic faux pas, it could have been a lot worse.
At Tuesday's state dinner honoring King Charles III and Queen Camilla, U.S. President Donald Trump said that during a private meeting earlier in the day the British monarch had agreed with him that Iran should never be allowed to have nuclear weapons.
“We’re doing a little Middle East work right now … and we’re doing very well,” Trump told the audience. “We have militarily defeated that particular opponent, and we’re never going to let that opponent ever — Charles agrees with me, even more than I do — we’re never going to let that opponent have a nuclear weapon."
While many Britons would agree with the president’s sentiment, the comment triggered mild consternation among pundits in the U.K.
In Britain, you see, this just isn't done.
By convention, people aren't supposed to relay private conversations with the monarch. That is partly because the king has to remain above the political fray, but also because the sovereign doesn’t have the ability to wade into a public debate and correct the record if he's misquoted.
“Generally, as a matter of protocol, I think I would expect discussions between heads of state to be sort of behind the scenes, in those closed meetings, for those to be sort of kept private,” said Craig Prescott, an expert on constitutional law and the monarchy at Royal Holloway, University of London. “And, you know, this was something that the U.K. government wanted to avoid.”
There had been a fair amount of jitters before the king's trip to the United States, which comes amid Trump's very public frustration with U.K. Prime Minster Keir Starmer over his failure to support U.S. actions in the Iran war.
Like all royal visits, this is a carefully choreographed diplomatic event carried out at the request of the U.K. government, which hopes that warm relations between the king and Trump, who seems to love all things royal, can help repair the rift.
But Trump is an unconventional leader who has a penchant for breaking protocol, and there were concerns about just what he might say or do.
At least in this case, the king’s comments seemed clearly within the bounds of existing U.K. government policy.
“The King is naturally mindful of his government’s long-standing and well-known position on the prevention of nuclear proliferation,” Buckingham Palace said in a statement designed to provide context to the president’s remarks.
Prescott said that “in a sense, this was always the issue, just what Trump would do or say — would he put the king in an embarrassing position,’’ Prescott said.
“You always had that sort of issue of what he would post on social media," he said. "And I think, you know, this could have been much, much worse.”
Before the state dinner, Charles gave a speech to a joint session of U.S. Congress. The king received repeated standing ovations during the address, which celebrated the longstanding bonds between the U.S. and Britain while nodding to differences over NATO, support for Ukraine and the need to combat climate change.
Now, from the U.K. government’s point of view, the trip is shifting to safer ground as the king and queen leave Washington behind and head to New York, where the focus will be on the city’s creative industries, rather than politics.
The most difficult part of the trip may be over, Prescott said.
“If this is the only controversy arising out of this phase of the state visit, I think overall this has been an enormous success for the king and the British government, because the king was able to make some quite pointed remarks in Congress and it hasn’t really yielded any sort of negative reaction from the president.”
“In a sense,” he said, “you get the feeling that the king (has) rather charmed Washington with his speech to Congress and, you know, his very witty speech at the state banquet.”