Buckingham Palace has finally announced that the King and Queen’s planned visit to the US will indeed go ahead at the end of April 2026. After US President Donald Trump launched a string of verbal attacks on the UK Prime Minister, there had been growing calls for Keir Starmer to cancel the King’s visit, which he is due to make to celebrate the 250th anniversary of US independence. The Liberal Democrats, for instance, had urged the PM not to grant ‘yet another huge diplomatic coup’ to a President ‘who repeatedly insults and damages our country.’ However, little academic attention has been paid to the issue of whether, as a matter of constitutional law, it would have even been possible for the PM to cancel the visit in the first place. Further, what say, if any, might the King himself have had in the matter?
State visits: a matter for the UK Royal Visits Committee
The UK Royal Visits Committee is responsible for coordinating state visits, both incoming and outgoing. It is chaired by the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (‘FCO’) and is mainly comprised of members of the Cabinet Office. However, notably the private secretaries to both the King and Prince of Wales attend meetings of the Committee, as does the Prime Minister, the Keeper of the Privy Purse, the Chief Executive of UK Trade and Investment (UKTI), and the national security adviser (Philip Murphy, ‘State Visits Made and Received by the British and Other European Monarchical Heads of State’ in Robert Hazell and Bob Morris, The Role of Monarchy in Modern Democracy: European Monarchies Compared (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020).
The Cabinet Office is responsible for passing the recommendations of the RVC to the minister responsible for offering formal advice to the monarch. At the beginning of the late Queen’s reign this was initially the Foreign Secretary, as overseas royal visits were seen as acts of British foreign policy. However, since the early 1970s it has been the prime minister who advises the monarch on overseas trips (Ibid). As a 2025 parliamentary research paper notes, state visits are a prerogative matter and thus subject to ministerial advice. According to the Cardinal Convention which governs ministerial advice on prerogative matters, the monarch is constitutionally bound to accept advice tendered by the Prime Minister.
Prior to confirmation of the visit, the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Dame Emily Thornberry, had warned that the trip should be cancelled as, against the current political backdrop, it risked ’embarrassing’ their Majesties. Would this have been a legitimate reason for the RVC to recommend calling off the visit? Historical precedent does indeed seem to suggest that, where there is a risk that an ongoing political situation could embarrass the monarch, it is possible for a planned state visit to be cancelled. For example, ahead of the US bicentennial celebrations in 1976 the British Ambassador in Washington, Lord Cromer, warned the RVC against the Queen visiting Washington as, amid the backdrop of the Watergate controversy, there was ‘a very real chance not only of embarrassment to Her Majesty, but of impairment to the dignity of the monarchy’ (Murphy, above). RVC representatives from the FCO subsequently endorsed Cromer’s suggestion that that the then-Prince Charles should go instead on behalf of the Queen. Nevertheless, the Committee ultimately chose to recommend that the Queen should go as the British monarch’s presence was deemed necessary in order to ‘symbolically reaffirm ties’ between the US and UK previously severed during the reign of her great-great-great-grandfather George III. Similarly, it seems that the RVC has, on balance, deemed that the benefits of ‘celebrat(ing) the historic connections and the modern bilateral relationship’ between the UK and US outweigh any potential embarrassment that could be caused to the monarchy.
Does the King himself have had a say?
It is notable that the RVC makes only recommendations regarding state visits. It is also notable that the monarch’s own private secretary attends meetings of the RVC. Such is the large element of contingency in planning state visits that the recommendations of the RVC are often ‘hedged with qualifications’ and have the ‘quality of the manipulation of a Rubic’s Cube’ (sic) (Murphy, above). As such, the formal ministerial ‘advice’ resulting from the RVC is ‘tentative, offering the Palace considerable discretion and room for manoeuvre’ (Ibid, emphasis added).
Such discretion can arguably be seen in February 1974, when the general election had produced a hung Parliament in the UK. The uncertainty surrounding which party or parties would form the next government led the Queen’s Private Secretary to question whether the Queen should go to Australia as planned on 6th March. The civil servant Robert Armstrong concluded that this decision “was one for The Queen to make without ministerial advice either from British ministers or from Australian ministers, since only She was in a position to balance the conflicting considerations” (Philip Murphy, The Empire’s New Clothes: The Myth of the Commonwealth (2018, OUP), 90-91). She ultimately took the decision not to go. It is, however, worth noting that the Queen may have been given wider discretion with regard to this particular visit as it was to a Commonwealth realm, and was thus a royal visit rather than state visit stricto sensu.
In this instance, it cannot be known whether the King personally expressed a view that his visit to the US should go ahead. One royal insider reportedly told The Times that he was ‘determined’ that the visit proceed as planned. Nonetheless, one can equally imagine that Charles was less than enthusiastic about the prospect of visiting the US, given that such a visit is mired with potential pitfalls for him personally. Firstly, there is the issue of his brother Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s controversial – and potentially criminal – association with the convicted paedophile and financier Jeffrey Epstein. Since the visit was announced, there have been calls for Charles to meet with survivors of Epstein’s abuse while in the US. There is also the complicating factor of his son Prince Harry, who resides in California with his wife and children, with whom Charles has had an estranged relationship for several years.
That this decision was driven primarily by members of the Government who sit on the RVC, rather than royal representatives, is perhaps confirmed by the peculiar wording of the press release. It is telling that Buckingham Palace prefaced the announcement with the caveat that ‘On advice of His Majesty’s Government, and at the invitation of The President of the United States, The King and Queen will undertake a State Visit to the United States of America’ (emphasis added). Although, as noted above, every state visit is ultimately taken on advice of His Majesty’s Government, it speaks volumes that the Palace made this explicitly clear. Such explicit wording is by no means a feature of every Buckingham Palace press release announcing a state visit, as a glance at previous releases announcing the last two outgoing state visits undertaken by the King reveals.
The Buckingham Palace statement announcing their Majesties’ state visit to Canada in 2025 simply read ‘The King and Queen will visit Canada from Monday 26th to Tuesday 27th May.’ In this case, it is perhaps understandable that there was no explicit reference to ‘advice of His Majesty’s Government’. After all, ‘a constitutional principle that (is) central’ to the planning of outgoing state visits to countries of which the King is head of state ‘is that prime ministers of the Commonwealth Realms have the right of direct access to the (King), and the British Prime Minister (is) not competent to advise (him) on visits to (his) Realms’ (Murphy).
Yet, even the Buckingham Palace statement announcing the King’s most recent foreign trip to the Vatican City – quite clearly not a Commonwealth realm – simply read ‘Their Majesties The King and Queen will undertake a State Visit to the Holy See in late October 2025’. There was no explicit mention of the visit being taken ‘on advice of His Majesty’s Government’, despite the fact that it was recognised at the time that ‘the King (was) carrying out the visit on behalf of the government’. Indeed, while not making direct reference to ‘His Majesty’s Government’, the King’s spokesperson seemed to tacitly acknowledge the importance of the trip from the Government’s point of view:
[A]t times of such global challenge, it has seldom been more important for Christian communities around the world to unite in faith and in fellowship with our partners. This provides a bulwark against those promoting conflict, division and tyranny, and supports our work together in Harmony to protect nature…[T]hese are, of course, the issues that directly impact lives and livelihoods in Britain…
Nevertheless, Buckingham Palace deemed explicit reference to ‘advice of His Majesty’s Government’ unnecessary on that occasion. This would imply that, in relation to the US state visit, the Palace are keen to make it known that the decision to send the King to meet Trump – a hugely controversial one at a time when the President is engaged in with Iran and openly critical of the UK’s refusal to join the war – was instigated by ministers, rather than monarch. It was the British government that suggested in early January 1975 that a royal visit during the Bicentennial celebrations ‘would seem to be appropriate’ (Robert M. Hendershot and Steve Marsh, ‘Britain’s ‘Big Gun’: Queen Elizabeth II and the Anglo-American Special Relationship’ (2026) The English Historical Review 1, 22). It would appear that, once again, it was the British Government that suggested over 50 years later that a royal visit for the Semiquincentennial celebrations would also seem to be appropriate.
The right decision?
The RVC has scope to cancel or delay planned state visits depending on domestic or world events. For example, according to minutes from an RVC meeting in 1982 ‘[A] visit by King Juan Carlos was dependent upon developments over Gibraltar’ (Royal Visits Committee, Extracts of the Minutes of a Meeting held in the Cabinet Office, 18 May 1981: FCO 57/975). This particular US state visit did not need to happen in April; rather, the Committee could have recommended that it take place later in the year when tensions between the UK and US may have somewhat died down. That it chose to press ahead with the visit next month as planned suggests that the Government believes that this is an opportunity to use its trump card – the King – to ease tensions.
It has good reason to believe this. Trump has shown little respect for the traditional rules-based order, but we do know that he admires the British royal family and all its grandeur (Steve Marsh, ‘Courting Trump: Anglo-American Relations and the House of Windsor’ (2026) The International History Review 1). Evidence suggests that the King may be one of the few individuals to whom he is willing to listen. For example, Charles was credited with helping improve US support for Ukraine when, just a week after hosting President Trump at Windsor Castle in September 2025, the President went from urging Kyiv to make territorial concessions to insisting, at the UN General Assembly of Nations, that it could win back all of the territory captured by Russia since 2022. According to Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, King Charles was a ‘key influence‘ on this policy shift: “I’d like to mention that it was a great visit of President Trump to the United Kingdom, and I know the position of His Majesty… it was very important.” The King was also praised for successfully ‘reminding Trump that a 51st state is off the table’ following his Speech from the Throne delivered during his state visit to Canada last year. Most recently, the King reportedly helped play a role in encouraging the President to backtrack from his comments about British soldiers ‘staying back’ from the front lines in Iraq.
The President has launched a wave of controversial actions since the last time he met Charles in September 2025. These include making increasingly vociferous threats to buy Greenland, capturing Venezuela’s President Maduro, and launching a joint military operation with Israel in Iran, all of which have received (albeit varying levels of) criticism by the UK government. The upcoming state visit potentially offers an opportunity for tensions that have arisen between the UK and US administrations in recent months to be eased and points of difference to be addressed. As Johnson writes, ‘while (state visits) can indicate a desire to broker closer relations…they can also be used to quell tensions’ (emphasis added), as she argues was the case during the state visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to the US in 1939 in the months preceding World War II (Gaynor Johnson, ‘Royal diplomacy: British preparations for the State Visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to the United States, June 1939’ (2021) Diplomacy and Statecraft 330).
The ability of state visits to ease international tensions may perhaps be facilitated by the constitutional convention that during outgoing state visits, the monarch should be accompanied by the British Foreign Secretary (Murphy). It has been widely reported that foreign secretary Yvette Cooper will accompany the royals on their trip to the US. This offers the opportunity for a face-to-face meeting with her American counterpart in a more convivial atmosphere characterised by the ‘message of peace and goodwill’ which state visits to the US by British monarchs have historically brought (Hendershot and Marsh, 5). If so, then the RVC will no doubt consider its recommendation to send the King to the US to have been a sound one.
Grateful thanks to Dr Scott and Professor Wheatle for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this post.
(Suggested citation: F. Jackson, ‘King Charles, President Trump and the State Visit: Some Constitutional Considerations’, U.K. Const. L. Blog (8th April 2026) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/))
UK Constitutional Law Association 