Palace and Downing Street tensions over slavery apology row during King Charles’s Antigua visit, Digi Mart USA News (Antigua): A trip to a Commonwealth nation once meant little more than local costume accessories and a warm, set-piece speech for the King. Those days are gone.
During King Charles’s visit to Antigua, he was drawn into a row over the dark history of slavery and whether the United Kingdom owes an apology and reparations for its role in what he called a “monstrous injustice.”
Buckingham Palace may not have been surprised by the issue itself, since Prince William faced protests over it during his 2022 visit to Jamaica and it dominated the 2024 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Samoa. What appears to have caught the Palace off guard was an intervention by Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
His offer to open “structured dialogue” with countries affected by the transatlantic slave trade, and his openness to a formal apology, made headlines while the King’s Caribbean tour was already under way.
A royal insider insists Charles was aware of the Prime Minister’s announcement in advance. Still, the move risked undermining the carefully managed choreography of a trip in which the Prime Minister and King are effectively sharing a stage.
Some insiders say it also led to hushed backroom recriminations and claims that Burnham tried to push the King further than he wanted to go on these issues.
Burnham ruled out financial reparations but signaled a willingness to discuss Britain’s wider historical responsibility. Whether or not that was intended, his intervention increased pressure and attention on the King over how he would address the matter.
One senior Whitehall source said Charles “hated” being dragged into political rows.
Burnham’s statement on a possible apology went considerably further than the King’s carefully prepared speech for Antigua, which had been reviewed back and forth between the Palace and No 10 before sign-off. In it, the King told Commonwealth leaders that the slave trade was a “monstrous injustice” that “fills my heart with horror and my soul with the most profound personal sorrow.” That was not much of a step beyond Prince William’s expression of “profound sorrow” during the Jamaica visit four years earlier.
The King also said that investment in education, jobs, trade and climate resilience were practical ways of addressing the wrongs of the past, measures nations are essentially asking for in the form of reparations. Burnham responded to the speech at a hotel reception later that day: “Perfect,” he said.
“Well done.”
The Palace has insisted the King was not blindsided and that relations with the Prime Minister remain good. However, conversations with multiple sources familiar with the discussions suggest there may have been differences behind the scenes over the timing, handling and political implications of the announcement.
One source said the difficulties may have stemmed from the fact that the Palace and Government operate at different speeds, noting that the Palace typically has a much smaller team. “The pace of the Palace is very different to the pace of government,” the source said, adding that there had been some tensions over the timetabling of the announcement.
One source also said the King was playing a “double game” on the issue, reluctant to see further Commonwealth realms sever constitutional ties with the monarchy during his reign. With Jamaica and Antigua and Barbuda considering moves toward republican status, the source suggested Charles was keen to avoid losing more realms “on his watch” and was attempting to “slow them down.” A senior aide to the King, however, told the media on Friday that the King was “open” to being ousted as head of state.
“The King and the Royal family are there to serve the people of these regions for as long as they wish,” the aide said. “But if they don’t wish it any more, then we really are fully open to that.”
Buckingham Palace has made clear that any formal apology over slavery is a matter for the Government rather than the monarch. The timing of Burnham’s intervention relative to the King’s speech nonetheless raised questions about whether the Government had placed Charles in an uncomfortable position.
A source close to the Palace said the episode seemed strange, since any decision on an apology would rest with the Government. “I have found the whole thing odd,” the source said.
“I would have expected the Palace not to have a view on this, separate from the government. So, I don’t quite know what has happened.”
The source offered two possible explanations. The first was that the Government reached its position relatively late, leaving the Palace little time to respond.
The King’s speech would have been written and cleared with Downing Street weeks beforehand. The second was that Burnham made political commitments not yet agreed with the Foreign Office, leaving the Palace unsure “who to listen to.”
Former Home Secretary and Lord Chancellor Jack Straw told BBC Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster on Saturday that he doubted the Government had made things difficult for Charles. Straw said what the monarch says at international summits is “very much the subject of collaboration” between the Palace, Downing Street and, to some extent, the Foreign Office.
He suggested the question of an apology would almost certainly have been settled in advance, and said that, in Burnham’s position, he would have told the Palace to leave the matter to the Prime Minister and his Government.
A senior aide to the King firmly rejected any suggestion that Charles had been taken by surprise. The aide, who spoke to a number of royal correspondents in Antigua, told The Times that Buckingham Palace had been informed about Burnham’s proposed intervention before it was published.
“I talked to the prime minister myself. We were told the terms in which he was proposing to write his op-ed and he’s perfectly entitled to do that,” the aide said.
The aide also insisted there was “genuinely a good relationship” between the King and the Prime Minister, and described the monarch as “a great secret weapon” for diplomacy. “I think what we’re seeing is a very clear pattern emerging of the Government asking the King to head into quite politically charged situations, quite challenging situations,” the aide said.
The King, they added, “is able to reach the parts that dare I say politicians probably couldn’t quite have reached.”
These comments underline how much Charles is relied upon to help maintain Britain’s relationships with countries where the Government’s own diplomatic influence may be more limited. The previous Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Samoa in 2024 was particularly difficult for the British delegation, reportedly catching it off guard over the strength of feeling on the slave trade.
Starmer was left to negotiate the wording of the final communique during a leaders’ retreat without his aides.
The debate over an apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade remains unsettled. Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Afrikan Reparations and attended the summit in Antigua, welcomed Burnham’s offer of talks but said Britain was still approaching the issue on its own terms.
She told Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster that the country appeared to be “hearkening back to empire” by deciding what should be said and whether Britain would apologize, even though the Commonwealth is intended as an association of equal nations. The Antigua summit, she suggested, showed how difficult it remains for Britain and the King to accept that Britain no longer sets the terms of the relationship.
