Silly season hits top form with wild claims about Queen Camilla

Summer is known as silly season for a reason. It’s a time of holidays, breaks, moments away from everyday life. And that used to mean that news stopped. A lack of actual events meant a big hole in media coverage and so anything and everything became fair game. Once upon a time, not that long ago, that mean skateboarding ducks. But in a 24 hour news age where stories can appear everywhere within moments, the intensity of the silliness is off the scale. Hence the somewhat medieval headlines about Queen Camilla that are currently doing the rounds.

Less than a fortnight after her birthday when everywhere was packed with smiling photos of The Queen, an online frenzy has led to claims that she is ‘in exile’ and has been run out of the palace gates. The magnificently melodramatic language accompanying the story only add to its silliness. Vague reasons are given for this sudden Game of Thrones moment and not one of them makes any sense. But, no matter. In an age when social media rules, a good photo and a hint at something sensational is enough to drive interest. And this story is getting plenty of that.

It all began with Queen Camilla taking the radical decision to, checks notes, have a holiday in the summer. Yes, Her Majesty has ripped up the rule book and headed off on vacay while the sun is shining. You would think someone not being around for a few weeks in July or August would be fairly self explanatory. But no. For some, it must mean something more is going on. And that something more appears to be a mix of Charles III going full Henry VIII and a bad episode of a soap opera.

Wild claims that she has been sent packing are just that. Claims with no basis. Anyone with any knowledge of the Royal Family knows that King Charles and Queen Camilla have, for years, taken separate breaks in the summer. The Queen likes a bit of sun and a small gin or two, The King enjoys rain and a good old chat with himself. Like any long married, sensible couple, rather than wind each other up they just do their own thing for a week or so then take a break together, too.

However, King Charles doing his own mini tour of Scotland (nuclear power and big ships in just a few days, what is Camilla thinking taking a swerve?) without his consort following in his wake has been taken by those who wish to spread whispers as gold plated evidence of marital misery.

Charles and Camilla’s love story has lasted decades and we all know about the less than pretty part that hurt others. But they have stuck with each other a long, long time. The idea that anything could part them now is, quite frankly, ridiculous. The Queen’s devotion to The King during one of the hardest parts of his life – a cancer diagnosis not long after the loss of his own mother – speaks for itself. King Charles adores his wife and Queen Camilla adores her husband.

But that’s by the by for those who want to get attention for content. It’s no doubt water off a duck’s back for Queen Camilla who lived through one of the most intense media speculations of any royal during the 1990s. But it’s an indicator, too, of how wrong information can suddenly appear to hold some weight if it’s polished and pushed enough. The fact that one of the main searches online now involves the world ‘exile’ and ‘queen’ shows that. What started as as wild imagining for attention now attracts a heavy weight of online queries that give it a totally different life.

It’s also, dare we say it, ever so slightly sexist. This idea that a man controls a relationship totally, that a woman can be spurned for a digression, that a partnership isn’t an equal relationship between two people who decide together how their future plays out – it’s all old fashioned and overblown and just out of kilter with the times.

In silly season, the saying that today’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper used to hold weight. Fish and chips is far too expensive now to hold common currency and you can’t wrap up any dinner with a website. The basic tenet, that this silly season spectacular will be forgotten as quickly as it happened, remains. But the wild rumours about Queen Camilla are just that. Rumours with no basis. Just very, very silly ones.