“This is going to be a very significant state visit to the United States and the biggest diplomatic challenge of King Charles’s reign,” the BBC royal correspondent Sean Coughlan pronounced as the King and Queen flew into Joint Base Andrews in Maryland this afternoon.
And who could disagree? Would you want to be in Charles’s shoes over the next four days?
But this is not self-inflicted pain for Britain’s ever-challenged royal family. We can’t blame Harry and Meghan, or Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, or Charles himself.
It’s been 250 years since America threw off the colonial yoke; water under the bridge. If, as Coughlan says, this really is Charles’s toughest assignment in his six decades as a working royal, there’s only one man to blame: Donald J. Trump.
Officially, President Trump is a royalist, just like our own beloved Tom Sykes (who is in the USA doing TV spots all this week, leaving me, a colleague, to fill in as best I can).