Enough with the King’s prostate

How very nice that the King is now out of hospital, back home and, will, we are told, soon be back in business with his red boxes. Is it too much to hope that we can be spared further updates on his condition? 

We have, I think, heard enough about his enlarged prostate. Charles has been praised for being so open about his diagnosis in the hope that it will encourage other men to investigate this important organ. NHS England declared that the ‘enlarged prostate’ page on its website was read every five seconds on the day of the King’s diagnosis, which is terrifically gratifying. The Telegraph was terrifically upbeat about Charles ensuring that men ‘do not die of embarrassment’. Its headline read, ‘All Hail the King’s Prostate Honesty’. Oh yuck. Can we stop?

No doubt many men don’t make enough fuss about their prostate. But do we really have to know any more? Do we need constant news about the King’s organ? Couldn’t he have gone quietly into hospital for a ‘minor operation’ and then let it be known in a few months’ time what the problem was? Did we need regular updates from the press office? 

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My own preference would be for reticence about these things. It’s not that men shouldn’t be getting to know their urologist, or that one is unsympathetic to the problem, not having a prostate. Kate has let it be known she went into hospital for an abdominal problem and that’s already too much information. If she explained that she had, say, an ovarian cyst or something gynaecological, there’d be a rash of feature pieces about cysts. But it would still be more than we need to know.  

It’s quite a long time since Walter Bagehot, the constitutional expert, declared that ‘above all things our royalty is to be reverenced and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it… Its mystery is its life. We must not let daylight upon magic’.

There’s been an awful lot of daylight let in on the magic in the last generation, and it hasn’t done the monarchy much good. The more we know about it, the less venerable it seems. Do I need to mention Harry and Meghan? Her suicidal thoughts, his self-esteem issues? Spare was an exercise in Too Much Information. Like mushrooms, royalty flourishes away from daylight.  

Mind you, there are limits – Queen Victoria apparently would only let her doctor examine her abdomen through her voluminous dress, which meant her prolapsed womb never got diagnosed. But the more we know about the innards of royalty, the more we’ll want to know. Charles is the King, not a walking advertisement for NHS urology. Tell us less!