King Charles Has Apparently Gone Rogue with His Christmas Day Speech

There’s not much we can rely on anymore to happen year-to-year, without question, but one standby on Christmas Day for the royal family is this: the King’s Speech (formerly, for 70 years, the Queen’s Speech) will air at 3 p.m. U.K. time on December 25. This year, it seems, King Charles has gone rogue with the speech, with Tatler reporting that Charles penned it without the help of advisors and that it will be more extemporaneous, the outlet reports.

The first Christmas broadcast was delivered by King George V in 1932 and has become a tradition for all in the U.K. and those who follow the royal family around the globe. This year, following a developing instinct of Charles’ for speaking off the cuff, Charles has eschewed advice in favor of doing it his own way, it seems. The Daily Mail reports he has written the speech without recourse to royal advisors; now 75 years old and having gotten the hang of this whole royal thing, Charles is “becoming increasingly confident in an instinctual approach to public speaking,” Tatler writes. “No doubt, he has plenty of experience by now.” 

Now, all of this to say that the Christmas message will be reviewed and edited to some degree, “otherwise the filming and production of it would be impossible,” Tatler continues. However, just like last year (his first King’s Speech), The Daily Mail reports that advisors were allowed only to make minor alterations to the speech and done only to fit with the production team’s work that broadcasts the message.

A pivotal moment for the King happened in 2012 during Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, when Charles (then Prince of Wales) decided he didn’t like the speech in his formal notes and rewrote the entire oration in the Royal Box, on the fly and off the cuff. “Since then, he has grown increasingly into an authentic and from-the-heart approach to speechmaking,” Tatler reports.

And that Diamond Jubilee speech was effective—if you’ll remember, he fired up the crowd to chant his father Prince Philip’s name loudly so that Philip might hear it from the hospital, where he was recuperating; “it moved the Queen almost to tears,” The Daily Mail reports. 

Last year’s Christmas message—his first, given just three months after the death of Her late Majesty in September—focused on grief and loss. The location of the speech was a quite tender reflection of the loss, as the King spoke from the Quire in St. George’s Chapel, where his mother is laid to rest.

“Christmas is a particularly poignant time for all of us who have lost loved ones,” he said in the Christmas message last year. “We feel their absence at every familiar turn of the season and remember them in each cherished tradition.”

The Daily Mail writes that “The King has learnt that he speaks best when he does so as off-the-cuff as possible, a talent he learnt relatively late in life.” Though we don’t yet know what he will say, exactly, contenders for inclusion are his Coronation (which happened in May), the conflict in Gaza, and climate change, which is one of Charles’ chief concerns as a devoted environmentalist.