King Charles’s deeply moving D-Day speeches

Eighty years ago, in the run up to D-Day, King George VI and his Prime Minister Winston Churchill were caught up in an unseemly private squabble. Both men wished to accompany the combined Allied forces into battle, knowing that – as long as the initiative succeeded – it would be an unparalleled public relations coup. The King was swiftly forbidden to participate in such a risky act, but Churchill, not a man who listened to advice readily, attempted to be with the soldiers until the last moment, when he eventually acquiesced, not without grumbling and complaining. 

To commemorate D-Day, King Charles has made two major speeches – by far his most significant public addresses since he revealed his cancer diagnosis earlier this year – and in neither did he see necessary to refer to the squabble between his grandfather and his premier. His own Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was present at the event in Normandy yesterday, as was his likely successor Sir Keir Starmer, but neither were allowed to upstage the monarch, who delivered a powerful and affecting speech that had the Queen, and no doubt many others, in tears.