Reparations row: Why Royal Caribbean tour could make or break the King

0:02The Telegraph.

0:30exist it's a lot but now opill is putting birth control in our control opill is a daily birth control that's fda approved full prescription strength and estrogen free and 98 effective when used as directed grab it online or at most major retailers no prescription or doctor's appointment needed so if you're thinking about birth control check out opill to see if it's right for you use code giggly for 25 off your first month of opill at o p i l l dot com that's code giggly at opill.com birth control in your control. We love to see it. Finding the right size rug can be hard. Enter Ernesta. Designer quality, custom sized rugs cut to the exact size of your room and delivered in as little as two weeks.

1:14Not sure of the size or the material? Start with five samples for just$10 today to see them in your own light and match to your decor. Plus, get$50 toward any rug of your choice. Visit Ernesta.com today. That's E-R-N-E-S-T-A dot com. King Charles and Queen Camilla are embarking on a Caribbean royal tour next week, but are they going to get caught up in a slavery reparations row? It probably won't be all turquoise waters and white sands on this overseas trip. Nobody thinks slavery now was a great thing. Modern slavery exists today. I think we even witnessed it quite recently at the World Cup in Qatar.

1:55Okay, nobody advocates it. Nobody thinks it was great. It is something that anybody that was involved with it should be ashamed of. But why are the targets for these repayments always either the British or the British royal family? Hannah, you've got your passport up to date. You've packed your bags. You've got your little tiara. I haven't had my jabs yet, but there's plenty of time. How many jabs do you need to have. I haven't even looked it up. There's so much admin on these tours. Nobody understands. Although we're going to be playing the world's smallest violin as you embark for work on a tour of the Caribbean.

2:31It's going to be tough. Where are you going? With the King and Queen? Where am I going? On my holidays. Bahamas, Guyana, then Antigua and Barbuda. And at the end, it's Chogham. Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. Also known as Chogham. And where's Chogham taking place? In Antigua. Got you. Oh, there's West. Just things to do, isn't there? It could be a lot worse. With a week away. I've been to Guyana out of all of those, but not to the others. But then we've covered a lot of ground between us, haven't we? Following whales around and standing behind red ropes. So it's eight days. That's quite a long time, isn't it, for a couple in their 70s?

3:05And Camilla hates flying. And the King's still having treatment for cancer. So it's been a while since we've done a long tour. As you know, this used to be really normal. They used to go away for two or three weeks. Ten days was the average. Well, the Lake Queen was away for months on end, wasn't she? On the Royal Yacht Britannia. You know that when they went to the Caribbean, of course, it would be months on end because they would get there by boat and they'd moor up and hop off. In the modern world, we were used to 10 days in the spring, 10 days in the autumn. And since COVID and since cancer, we've been doing these tiny little trips.

3:36So this is a lovely return to multiple countries. Well, is it lovely? We've got people kicking off already. Now, you and I have covered previous royal tours involving the Caribbean and indeed Kate and William. In fact, I did a lot of Caribbean coverage with our old friend Prince Harry. Did you do the Rihanna one? Back when he liked me. Well, I did the Rihanna one. And in fact, at that point, Harry liked me so much that I was hand selected to do the pool with Rihanna. Me, Harry and Rihanna talking about HIV. You've got to show me a picture. I've got the photograph and we will attach it to our socials.

4:12I've got it somewhere in the annals of Tominy history. And I think I had a very interesting conversation with him about the evils of palm oil. And we got on like a house on fire. Simpler times. Simpler, happier times. Rihanna, she was very surprisingly shy and coy. Considering her onstage persona, she was a really sweet woman. I really liked her a lot. We saw her as well in Barbados when the king went to the handover ceremony. Yes. Which was this, I've never felt more sorry for him in my life at that ceremony. It was in the middle of the night, our time. So we'd flown over. It was less, it was 24 hours or something, I think.

4:52And they were doing this very important handover ceremony where they're essentially getting rid of the monarchy. And Charles, it must have been like 3am, 4am. And his body clock time was having to sit very magnanimously through a lot of speeches saying, thanks, but no thanks. We don't want you anymore. He did a really warm, friendly speech to say, it's your decision. We're still your friends. And we were sitting there thinking, is he going to nod off? We're all so tired. And he didn't. That is the monarchy. And actually, technically, it wasn't everybody in the country's decision because there was no referendum.

5:27It was decided by the government. The people did not have their say. And I think we should just lodge that in the minds because just as every Caribbean royal tour is accompanied by protesters, there are plenty of other people cheering them on as they arrive on the scene. But the trouble is these tours have all been tainted in recent times by calls for slavery reparations. Now, I look at this as I do any call for anyone to pay trillions of quid for the mistakes of their ancestors and think it's completely and utterly bonkers. Do you? Well, do you really want me to start opining on this subject?

6:05Okay, I will briefly. I think when you look back at the numbers, first of all, let's caveat all this. Nobody thinks slavery now was a great thing. Modern slavery exists today. I think we even witnessed it quite recently at the World Cup in Qatar. Okay, nobody advocates it. Nobody thinks it was great. It is something that anybody that was involved with it should be ashamed of. But why are the targets for these repayments always either the British or the British royal family? So comparatively to, say, Portugal, we took far fewer slaves. In comparison to Arab countries in the Middle East, we literally didn't take hardly any at all.

6:45Meanwhile, when it comes to royals actually keeping slaves, let's go back and look at the kings of Benin. There was one Beninian king, King Gezo, who said, and I quote, the slave trade is the ruling principle of my people so are the people in the caribbean and africans going to go back to their own nations and say could you please pay up for the slavery of your very own people so i'm merely saying that if we're going to be asking for reparations can we be very even-handed and apply them to everybody across the world that took slaves i don't think there would be many countries that would be excluded so i think the targeting of the king and queen like this is a little bit rum, to be honest.

7:30Do you think it's exploiting, not a weakness, but somebody they think is quite empathetic towards the cause? Because King Charles has spoken about this a lot. I was with him in Ghana a couple of years ago where he walked through the door of no return, which is just this evocative, appalling bit of architecture where slaves were taken across the Atlantic. He's addressed it in multiple speeches. He's very calm and collected and not easygoing. But he's not afraid to take on the issue of slavery. But it isn't actually his decision. This is one for the Prime Minister. It's also not his fault. I mean, where are we going with this?

8:11Are we going to continue, for instance, to ask the current population of Germany to pay reparations for the crimes of the Nazis? I mean literally where does this end? Yes I think King Charles is an easy target because he is likely to express sympathy with those who think they were historically very badly done by and because he has got a degree of sensitivity to his soul and that he has done quite a lot of work on multi-faith and reaching across different diverse populations. he takes seriously his role as the head of the Commonwealth and of course there are questions to be answered and I do think by the way that William and Kate drew the right conclusion following their own rather disastrous tour of the Caribbean in saying we've got to leave a lot less unsaid the policy of never complain never explain doesn't really wash in the 21st century when at the time we had the weird spectre didn't we of them traveling on the back of a Land Rover being driven by the Prime Minister and his wife.

9:13And I made the point from a PR perspective that while they tried to recreate the magic of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip from several decades earlier, that moment was of its time. And in more modern times, we should have had a situation there where I think William and Kate were driving the Land Rover and they had the Prime Minister and his wife on the back. That would have been a better look. So listen, the optics of this all matters. I just think calls for slavery reparations, literally calls for people in 2026 to pay for the mistakes stroke crimes of people living in previous centuries is preposterous.

9:52Comparatively, Britain took far fewer slaves than Arab countries. So we took about three million. They took up to 17 million. And by the way, while we abolished slavery back in the 1800s, Saudi Arabia, the Yemen, they didn't abolish it until the 1960s. And in fact, Mauritania didn't abolish it until 1980, would you believe? That's my point. But yeah, the thing about Charles is he's always going to be amenable to having the conversation, which I think makes him quite admirable compared to others, perhaps. There are three things that could go wrong on this tour, I suppose. the calls for slave trade reparations are one and that is definitely going to come up at Chogham we've heard already campaigners already calling for it there's the issue of derailming republicanism trips to the Caribbean are always accompanied even when you look back decades to Elizabeth II's day always accompanied by people saying let's use this as an opportunity to discuss whether we still need a monarchy and if we do why are they so far away what do they do for us number two And number three, as you brought up with the Wales' tour, is the unexpected things that go wrong.

11:02And we saw on that tour how a narrative can almost out of the blue just grow legs and that's it. A tour goes down in history as a disaster tour of the Caribbean where on the ground, you know, everybody felt so differently to what we saw on the front pages back here. You know, that awful photo of the fence. What people on the ground said was that there was such a buzz and so much excitement. There were so many more people that came down to see the then Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Catherine O 'William, do this event. There was just a fence there. They didn't put a fence there. I think it was a sports ground.

11:40There was a wire fence there. Loads more people came down. They kind of caught their eye. They were shouting to them as they were leaving. So they went over to say hello. But all it takes is nowadays one photograph and it looks like something it isn't. And that's the image that has gone around the world. And that's the danger for the king here, that a small number of protesters or campaigners can really shift the narrative of a tour completely. But listen, if any of these countries want to have a referendum on keeping the monarchy or not, they're more than welcome to do so. That was the problem with Barbados.

12:12there were question marks over whether that decision had been taken democratically when the public weren't actually consulted it was a left-leaning republican government that decided to push through legislation to say we want to disenfranchise from the monarchy completely the same questions face countries in the caribbean as they do australia new zealand or canada and that is always well if we don't have the royal family as our head of state who do we have who do we elect as president. You know, in Canada, what do we want? Do we want Prime Minister Trudeau to become President Trudeau one day? If we became a republic here, President Tony Blair, anyone?

12:48President David Beckham? President Meghan Markle? You know, this is the problem. Never say never. Never say never. So all of these countries face the same dilemma and they're having to decide whether it's a case of better the devil you know. I just think there's something slightly sort of cynically opportunistic about people banging this drum whenever a king or a prince is about to turn up. I mean, I guess it's good publicity. It's good publicity. And, you know, it's complicated. The legislation to remove the king as head of state is phenomenally complicated. So apathy almost always wins the day with these things.

13:22But the palace is prepared for it. They have recceed in palace speak this extensively. So nowadays they go out and they sort of preemptively troubleshoot what could possibly go wrong? Which little fires do they need to put out ahead of time? How do they even know that? Sir Clive. Sir Clive. So Sir Clive, who is smoother than a cashmere codpiece, the private secretary to the king, who you and I know well. I don't think he's ever forgiven me for me describing him at the height of Megxit in a piece of copy as a dead man walking. He's still in post now, although he has announced his retirement and we wish him luck in his next chapter.

14:04So, yeah, Clive never quite forgave me for describing him as that. But he's gone and made sure that all of the possible pitfalls have been filled in, have been the potholes have been pre-filled. Yes. Well, I don't mean it. I'm using him as a sort of figurehead here. This is a household. A lot of people. I don't think he's travelled himself, but they have people who plan the tours. They have people who communicate the tours to the likes of us. so they now in the days when you were going on tour with the late queen yes where it used to be sort of you almost go for a meeting ask your host what they want the queen to do pop her in a car and off she goes to tip all the boxes of what they want to showcase on the international stage now a big part of planning these trips is we've got to go into this with our eyes open and figure out what could possibly go wrong and how we're going to respond to it if it does they'll never be able to i mean what goes wrong is always something completely spontaneous like somebody where were they when suddenly somebody started heckling it was in australia it was in australia senator exactly a senator who's a massive and avowed republican started barracking charles uh shouting at him and it was all a bit embarrassing in the end i mean you can't ward against that oh no somebody's trousers have fallen down oh somebody's fallen over i mean in a way okay try and insulate but it will be the something will come from the least expected quarter.

15:21But that's their point, I suppose, of how you're going to deal with it. So on that tour, exactly, that senator, we said afterwards on the way home, you know, you need to send her a bunch of flowers. She almost made that tour for the king because his response to it went down so well. Of that, you know, she was she was shouting about indigenous rights. The next day, by chance, he was going to meet indigenous leaders where they gave him a hug and he made some great speeches and he came out of it looking like he'd listened and learned and responded to it well. And this is slightly what we're finding recently somebody said to me um that he is he he's sort of setting this tone where he seems to arrive in a succession of what is what are going to be difficult tools so how's he going to deal with trump in america how's he going to deal with indigenous rights in australia how's he going to deal with the residential schools something else that people want an apology for in canada and he seems to leave things a little bit calmer and a little bit smoother and he'll do a speech and people will say it's great well his speeches are quite good

16:24this is hannah burner from giggly squad opil is the first over-the-counter daily birth control pill available in the u.s let's be real getting a birth control prescription is not always easy and it's so much admin in fact about a third of women face barriers to access prescription birth control between scheduling appointments missing work class or just trying to exist it's a lot but now opill is putting birth control in our control opill is a daily birth control that's fda approved full prescription strength and estrogen free and 98 effective when used as directed grab it online or at most major retailers no prescription or doctor's appointment needed so if you're thinking about birth control check out opill to see if it's right for you Use code Giggly for 25 % off your first month of OPILL at O-P-I-L-L dot com.

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18:13We were analysing quite recently for some awards who had given the best speech of 2026, and it was decided that he probably did. In Congress. Yeah, exactly. So there you have it. I'm just trying to think, what was the moment, And the, yeah, the Republican slayer of the late noughties, of course, in Australia, when they were once again flirting with having another referendum on the royals, was, of course, Prince George. And I went on that tour. They took along a toddler. And the next thing we know, Australians fallen back in love with the royal family as we're all gathering around Uluru. Yes. So really, in a way now, we're going to be judging these sorts of royal tours with if it passes without incident and nobody has declared their desire to become a republic, we're probably all right.

19:03It's a low bar, but they'll probably reach it. The thing with this is there's a total contrast between the things that we talk about ahead of the tour now and the sorts of questions we ask of the palace, which is reparations, derailming and so on, and what people on the ground actually want the royals to do. so we have been told by sources at the palace that when they're planning the tour when you go to Guyana Bahamas Antigua Barbuda and you're talking about the program what they want the king and the queen when she joins him to do they want apparently it to be completely forward focused thinking about their modern countries what a modern relationship can look like showcasing their arts and their culture and their sport and having a bit of fun along the way well we like that that's what a royal tour used to be.

19:50Oh, I'll tell you what, it reminds me, the best royal tour I ever did was at the same time that he went to Jamaica, Prince Harry, and we ended up at Usain Bolt's running track. And I was with him. And then it was in the early days of mobile phones. I was like, I want to get a selfie with this guy. So I immediately threw a very, very basic phone at somebody and I've got a picture of me and Usain and we had all of the Jamaican... I thought you meant with Harry. No, sod him. No, I wasn't interested in him. I was interested in being next to the fastest man in the world. I couldn't believe him. He's a big guy.

20:20God, he was big. I was thinking, why is Camilla admitting this on the podcast? No, no, no. Fangirling Prince Harry? No, I want to. Hannah, please. There are some people I fangirl, alright? I went on a royal tour once and fangirled Gary Barlow of Take That. But this was your same book. Actually, I think that was the same tour. We had one tour where there was just so many great people on it that we were taking photographs left, right and centre. No, Harry was the least of our worries at that point, if you say Bolt is there. Obviously, when we look back at the life of Elizabeth II, one of the things that sets her apart was just how well travelled she was.

20:53I mean, wasn't it estimated that she'd circumnavigated the globe about 47 times or something? And she was, of her time, the world's best diplomat. I mean, there wasn't a country she hadn't visited or a world leader she couldn't have some shared memory with. She was absolutely staggering. And therefore, she commanded huge respect across the Commonwealth, even by those who had Republican sentiments because personally you didn't want to besmirch the Queen as a woman and as a character and as an icon of her era. Is Charles held up in the same regard and equally does he care as much about the Commonwealth as the Queen did?

21:32I think he does care as much. He always says apparently that the head of the Commonwealth is the only role he's ever been elected into. He really does care about it and trying to make a success of it. he is as well traveled as the queen was in her day although he doesn't go on these long royal Britannia trips anymore and he has built this very quiet network of friends around the world that we haven't really noticed because there was that long period 80s 90s where people weren't even going on his tours really no nobody was reporting on these speeches even though he was making them um so we have this situation in Guyana where the president is hugely pro reparations has been very clear even in the in the last week he's done an interview with ITV saying we need an apology and we need reparations but it turns out that he's actually a very good friend of the king's as well because the king helped him um convene people to fundraise to save the Guyana rainforest and he was in the Harmony documentary yes about the king's foundation and he's modeled some sustainable developments in Guyana after the king's projects at Dumfries House yeah so he has this whole network that we wouldn't necessarily know about or realise that is going to work in his favour now.

22:41I found it quite striking recently. I think after the late Queen died, there were a few years where wherever you travelled, all the speeches were really about her and people's memories of her and how she had visited them. And you still hear people talking about that all the time. I sat next to a Governor-General at dinner a little while ago and he was going through all these amazing memories of all the times he'd sat down with the late Queen. So there's still that fondness, But I think it's a bit infantilising to think that Charles doesn't have any of that. He hasn't been around quite as long, but he does have his own relationships already.

23:15He's been around long enough, let's be honest. I think it was in Guyana where we got to fly over some extraordinary waterfall. Sometimes all of these trips meld into one. I'm also, by the way, sitting here thinking, how are you packing for this? I think you might have to go full capsule wardrobe. With a poncho, just in case. You need to, like, Tetris this case. I mean, sorry, but I have done quite a few of these tours. I don't want to teach you to suck eggs. I will say, though, you did not do them in a video era where you had to be doing pieces to camera and podcasts left, right and centre. I don't know.

23:45I was so... Hang on a minute. Hannah Finesse. Always been a media whore. If there was a camera from a foreign broadcaster there, I would happily have spoken to it. I was wearing more makeup than Jackie Collins at a book launch back then. What are you talking about? I stand corrected. I was like NBC, Australian. just I had a young family I was just trying to make some extracurricular bunts wherever I could trying to make her way in the world so I'm saying block colors I'm saying floaty dresses I'm saying some blazers you throw in a few blazers uh do you need a little emergency kit of like dioralite dioralite compede okay uh just something in case you get mind you India's was the one where you get very ill and can't ever file copy.

24:34That's mid-November. I remember going to an India tour and going up to a pharmacist and he told me, Imodium doesn't work here. And most of the tour did discover that on day four. But that's not what this is. This is not a motivational pep tour. No, okay. And also we went somewhere, was it Belize, where the entire Royal Press Pack started drinking copious amounts of the local rum and people were nearly hospitalised. I don't know if you can narrow that down to one talk, can you? Well, no, possibly not. But just be careful on the old local grog. Fine. Right? Because words of wisdom. Know what these photographers are like, Hannah Finesse.

25:09Right, well, have a good time and we'll see you when you get back then. I mean, you call this work. I'll bring the gossip and the rum. Well, you enjoy that. I've got some well-deserved time off with the family because it's half term. So I'll enjoy that. And The Daily Teal will be back tomorrow with Tim and Jacob Wiesmog, 5pm.

25:49This is Hannah Burner from Giggly Squad. O-Pill is the first over-the-counter daily birth control pill available in the U.S. let's be real getting a birth control prescription is not always easy and it's so much admin in fact about a third of women face barriers to access prescription birth control between scheduling appointments missing work class or just trying to exist it's a lot but now opil is putting birth control in our control opil is a daily birth control that's fda approved full prescription strength and estrogen free and 98 effective when used as directed grab it online or at most major retailers, no prescription or doctor's appointment needed.

26:28So if you're thinking about birth control, check out OPILL to see if it's right for you. Use code GIGLY for 25 % off your first month of OPILL at OPILL.com. That's code GIGLY at OPILL.com. Birth control in your control. We love to see it. 98 of the top 100 U.S. accounting firms trust Bill to simplify and secure Bill Pay. That's proven financial infrastructure built on over a trillion dollars of secure payments. Visit Bill.com slash proven for a special offer.