Why did camilla stay in car?

[Estermay]

I think I missed the official explanation. So can anyone explain why camilla stayed in the car while Charles did an official visit in Kenya?
Was she unwell?

So a smear campaign on QC

Yes, that is nasty.

Exactly.

Obviously you didn't miss any official explanation, it was a made up lie in the first place.

It was said around QEs death / funeral that Camilla gets car sick - she was in the front seat for some of the longer car journeys to help manage it.

@Estermay

@wordler has already detailed and given photo evidence of what really happened. She did get out of the car and she did visit the garden. There is no point you or anybody else speculating further.

The facts about this were easy to find but you chose to start a negative thread instead.

How is it snide to ask why she stayed in the car?
It was reported in Kenya.

But it wasn't was it?

You could provide a link if it was.

She was chatting to her sister on the phone and they had just got to the good bit when it was time for Camilla to get out. I’m not going to give you the details but it was spicy and definitely worth creating a furore on MN about.

She has a bad back.

She's 76 years old - she could very well have health problems we know nothing about. She could've been exhausted - most people her age are retired and enjoying pottering at their own pace. Maybe it's really hot and she felt faint? I feel for them both having to take on this huge role at such a late stage of their lives - it must be a real strain at times.

It was tweeted by Nation Africa - I’ve posted a link to the tweet. It was badly worded - it did imply to me (and many others apparently) that Camilla waited in the car. We know now that she did not wait in the car.

The tweet was badly worded and that led to a misunderstanding, but it was hardly a smear campaign.

And I can’t find any reference to it in the few articles I’ve read today from that particular news site. (Although there are quite a few references to different works of Shakespeare in the articles about KC on this Kenyan visit. Comparing King Charles to King Lear, Richard II and Henry IV).

There was also more than one mention that many Kenyans are waiting for an apology - this has also been reported by Reuters, and a quick Google indicated other news media also reported on the question of an apology.

I think some people were hoping for an apology from Charles to Kenya - something like the apology given by the German leader to Tanzanians only days prior.

It’s my personal opinion that a proper apology to all the former colonies is warranted. That is just my opinion. I know there are people on here that disagree. I accept that they disagree.

I understand that there are feelings around this Kenyan tour, and a badly worded tweet didn’t help.

I understand that there are feelings around this Kenyan tour, and a badly worded tweet didn’t help

There were indeed feelings around the Kenya trip and you may be interested to know they were mostly positive. There has been interest in the PR world about the Palace employing AI software for the first time on this State Visit. This was used to sift through social media comments (both in Kenya, the UK and globally), categorising them into negative, neutral, and positive sentiments. Obviously, AI can review and record far far more comments than any human review can manage.

The results were interesting - from an article about it:

At the commencement of the King’s visit, his popularity rating on Kenyan social media stood at 38%. By the week’s end, it had catapulted to 70%. The monarch’s international score also soared from an initial 2% to a commendable 51% by Friday. In Britain, his popularity rating ascended from 7% to a robust 54%.

As Kenya has a young population - the median age there is just over 20 years old - and that group has a high engagement with social media, the commentators I heard discussing this issue thought that the Palace would be pleased with the results of the experiment. And it’s really interesting to see direct data like this - I suspect they will use tools like this more.

https://bnn.network/politics/king-charless-visit-to-kenya-ai-monitors-royal-popularity/

A little bit of news publishing history is relevant to this discussion. When laying out a newspaper page or saving a draft of an online article most layout editors required the journalist or photo editor to put a line of text under the photo even as a holding piece of copy (if they hadn’t thought of anything catchy or something which would add extra meaning to a particular story.)

Like headlines and sub heads, and the general copy this would likely be tweaked or changed by the senior copy editors anyway before publishing so a journalist writing an article or a photo editor placing a photo often didn’t want to spend hours crafting a clever pithy headline just to have it changed so would just stick anything in to ‘hold the space’ for layout.

As the photo caption is also one of the most frequently forgotten areas to check before pressing publish it is generally good practice to write something bland and sensible - every now and then some joker writes a silly caption to make his colleagues laugh and it accidentally gets published and then everyone gets bollocked by the editor.

So convention is to write a simple description of what you see and also the style convention is to write it in the present tense.

Camilla sits in the car during the King’s visit
^^
Andy Murray lies down on the tennis court during his first Wimbledon match
^^
A salmon leaps out of a Scottish stream

You are aiming for boring but accurate in case someone accidentally publishes it and you get blamed.

What has clearly happened with the Africa Nation tweet is either from a press agency pool photo, or their own in house photo editor, they have simply printed the photo and copy pasted the accompanying bland descriptive caption.

It’s not a report, it’s not trying to give you any specific information - it’s just content filler.

Every other news outlet who glanced at that tweet could see exactly what it was. Even if someone at a regular news outlet had accidentally read it the wrong way. “OMG she didn’t get out of the car???”

A three second Google of the video footage shows you she did - only fractionally later than Charles got out.

The only reason to turn that tweet into a story which claims Kenyan journalists were reporting that Camilla didn’t even get out of the car and spin it into a negative sounding incident is either malicious intent or ignorance (Celebitchy site) and blindly repeating the gossip site’s spin for click content (the scraper sites like Geo News which are bot/algorithm led, not staffed by trained journalists)

That’s interesting @wordler

And I share this information as someone who accidentally published a photo with a caption on a news report on a mainstream media news site which said.

”Blah blah something interesting here blah blah”

I still feel slightly hot when remembering it being brought to my attention by my manager.

That’s very interesting, serenster, about the use of AI to measure approval numbers in real time. A very handy tool. I’m sure Charles is most pleased. I wonder if it will replace traditional polls eventually. I guess it’s too early days yet for that. I need to read about it more. Will read all of the article you linked to but no doubt I’ll be back with more thoughts on this. Like, did Charles do something at any point that caused a dip in popularity, only to recover it with the next thing he did? It’s quite fascinating.

It’s be interesting to know what governments will make of it. Will they welcome it or hate it? Are they governing for the people which could then make this tool very handy, or are they governing for the richest few, and therefore this tool would probably be unwelcome?

Did Charles truly have a popularity rating as low as 7% in Britain before the Kenyan visit? Am I understanding that correctly? I wonder where it sits a week after his visit, or where it sits 2 weeks post visit to Kenya?

I’ve learned a few things about the difference in these countries - Kenya, Britain, US and Australia. while thinking about this AI tool and wondering how they factor in, or if they factor in?

In the latter three countries there is huge sm involvement. US comes in at about 80% of the population. Australia at 90%. Britain falls in between those two countries. Only just under 20% of Kenyans engage with sm. Age of population would be a factor too, as you noted. Kenya’s median age is 20 - approximately half that of the other three countries:

Its early morning here and I’m overtired and overthinking possibly too.

Having said all that, some of the writers I read, some of the social commentators I also read, and many of the sm commentators I follow do have views about the King’s visit to Kenya, and they’ve not changed during or since that visit: None that I’ve read so far, anyway.

Did Charles truly have a popularity rating as low as 7% in Britain before the Kenyan visit? Am I understanding that correctly

Yes this lept out at me, too. That KC'S popularity in the UK was as low as 7% but is now 54% thanks to the Kenya visit. My impression was that the reporting of this visit has been low key - but from what Serenster says it seems to have dramatically transformed the way the king is perceived. Remarkable.

Apart from that many posters have made good points:

Anything we say about the picture is speculation.

The point that the king and his consort are of an age when most people are slowing down and tiring easily is valid. Perhaps long tours are not a great idea.

The issue of the role of the monarchy in slavery and colonialism deserves its own thread. Unfortunately the RF seem to have zero appetite to even consider these questions.

So the story is 'camilla didn't get out of the car, quick enough for some people likings. So someone (a respected journalist according to Op) wrote a story making out she didn't get out at all'

@Estermay is your question now 'why would a respected journalist misrepresent what happened?'

Yes this lept out at me, too. That KC'S popularity in the UK was as low as 7% but is now 54% thanks to the Kenya visit. My impression was that the reporting of this visit has been low key - but from what Serenster says it seems to have dramatically transformed the way the king is perceived. Remarkable.

i don’t think that’s how this data should be interpreted.

Prior to this trip general sentiment towards the King and the Royal Family has been measured by regular polls by companies such as YouGov and Ipsos Mori - this has long been the “gold standard” in assessing what the public at large think of you/your brand/your products etc. If you look at those you can see that the King’s approval rating has been around 50% mark since his accession (I’ve attached YouGov’s summary on Charles below). This data comes from literally asking a sample of the population what they think about people/companies etc.

This AI data was a new measure - it was specifically assessing the sentiment of posts on social media. The AI product searches for and reads the hundreds of thousands of individual posts/tweets/TikTok’s etc, and assesses whether each one is positive, negative or neutral. The results are then pulled together.

So, this is based on totally different data to the YouGov polls. And, because it’s the first time this tool has been used, there is effectively no baseline figure. So if you start on Day 1 (before the trip starts) searching for anything that mentions Charles and something to do with Kenya, the figures were low. Once the trip started and people saw it/engaged with coverage/attended the events of the tip/engaged with others posts, the “positive” posts grew significantly.

@wordler @Serenster such fascinating and informative posts from you both. Thanks for taking the time to set all that out.

Smoking laws might be different in Kenya.

I thought she had given up smoking. I've definitely heard that she finds a hot climate quite difficult. I can understand that. My best bet is that she went a tiny bit dizzy in the heat and took just a few moments more than Charles before getting out of the car. Also, she doesn't want to be accused of upstaging him by leaping out faster. She's unjustly accused of quite enough already.

She has - she gave up decades ago. Charlie hates it.