So it's not technically "news" but I thought this was a good opinion piece in the Toronto Star:
He could have cancelled, but the thing with royals is that they don't.
Which meant that on the very day last week that newspaper headlines were shrieking that his former wife believed he plotted to kill her — and Scotland Yard was to investigate that supposition along with umpteen other conspiracy theories — Charles, Prince of Wales, had no option but to carry on with the job.
It was off to rural Hereford and the opening of a breast cancer support centre. More than 100 people turned up to get a good gawp at the man who is starting to resemble a royal version of the biblical Job.
"Keep your chin up, Charles," shouted one well-wisher. "The country is behind you," hollered another. But more than a few stood in censorious silence. As one woman, a self-described "life-long Diana fan," blithely told a reporter, "I came here because I wanted to see what the dirty rat looks like in real life."
As one bizarre scandal follows another, Charles, at 55, must be wondering if things can get any worse?
Well, how deep is the ocean?
Being accused of murder by your ex-wife must surely be the nadir.
Then again, the accusation, in October, that Charles had had a homosexual liaison and/or encounter with his former valet must have looked that way too.
Diana, dead more than six years, had a ghostly hand in that revelation as well, via her Earthly agent and former butler, Paul Burrell.
Back in 1996, the same busy year in which she was divorced and wrote a note — or letter or musing diary entry — saying she feared "my husband is planning `an accident'" to smooth the way to his remarrying, Diana also found time to tape a conversation with a troubled former footman named George Smith.
In it, Smith alleged not only that he had been raped by Charles' valet, but that he had witnessed the two of them in a "compromising position."
It was this tape that police were searching for when they raided Burrell's home back in 2002. They found, not it, but some 300 other items belonging to Diana, including the death note, that the ever-solicitous Burrell had taken for "safekeeping." (Or, for reference when he wrote the inevitable book, which he did last year.)
Nobody knows where the tape has got to. But, no matter, damage was done.
The world's media were given the go-ahead to stop obliquely referring to the valet and "an anonymous senior royal" when Charles' private secretary Sir Michael Peat took it upon himself to name the prince as the royal in question.
Peat did so, he said, only because the allegation was "risible."
As, indeed, it was. But the story gave fuel to those who think Charles' treatment of Diana was so loathsome that it might have included not only a long, adulterous affair with "the rottweiler," Camilla Parker Bowles, but also the occasional fling with male staff.
Last week, predictably, those same true believers were equally open to the fantastical idea that Diana had a premonition of the car crash that would kill her at age 36, and that her husband would be involved in it.
And even if Charles did not assign MI5 or MI6 to rig the car containing her and her iffy boyfriend Dodi Fayed, he still was somehow to blame. He'd been jealous of Diana and unfaithful; she wouldn't have been in Paris with Fayed and his drunk of a chauffeur if he hadn't been.
Those were actual facts, were they not?
No one with faculties even semi-intact, including the frenzied British press, thinks Charles plotted Diana's end so that he could be widower and not a divorced man, thereby getting around the sticky wicket of Church of England royal remarriage rules. Or, more preposterously, because he didn't want her to wed the Muslim Fayed.
But as the Daily Mail ruminated last week: "The danger is that even if most people accept his innocence — which is by no means certain — he will still be identified as someone who, in some unspecific way, contributed to her demise by his boorish behaviour and his long affair with Camilla.
"Could this unhappy, unpopular man ever be king?"
That sort of talk hasn't been heard since the hysterical aftermath of Diana's death in 1997. Charles was widely castigated as the villain of the soured marital fairy tale, though the ice-cold Windsors were included en masse in the fault-finding: They had all been bloody to her but he, in particular, and he didn't deserve to inherit the throne.
In the years since, the prince has worked steadily to recover his reputation as a decent man who wants only to do the right thing, by his lights.
And once the British press finally turned the page, it aided in his redemption.
Though Diana's more effusive parenting style always grabbed the spotlight, it became clear in time that Charles is also a good and sensitive parent. He is obviously adored by his sons, and the papers finally started to say so.
When the effervescent younger son, Harry, started skittering off the rails, drinking to excess and experimenting with soft drugs, Charles zapped him into a treatment centre for a day to see what could happen at the end of that particular path.
The press approved.
It also liked the way that Charles didn't present Camilla as a fait accompli in his public life. The pair, on-and-off lovers for three decades now, wisely took a softly-softly approach.
Only in the past year, did Camilla begin to accompany Charles on occasional royal engagements, staying in the background, but "with" him nonetheless, receiving a bouquet from the designated child in the crowd.
She was there beside him this fall at the Braemar Highland Games, a generally rain-soaked, annual event that Diana took elaborate pains to avoid.
After the Queen Mother died in 2002, they moved together into her former home, Clarence House, just down from Buckingham Palace. Nobody picketed. No "life-long Diana fans" were heard booing at the gates.
By last year, the majority of Britons may still have balked at the notion of Queen Camilla, but few objected to the prince marrying her. And, by all accounts, Camilla doesn't even want to be Queen and would settle for being a morganatic wife, with a title of some sort, but not, thanks awfully, the consort's crown.
Whether that chimed with Charles' views is unknown. And, with the latest calamity to swat him on the head, it may remain so.
"It is very clear he is suffering a great deal," Harold Brooks-Baker, director of publisher Burke's Peerage, said last week. "He can't get on with his personal life. He could hardly announce tomorrow that he will marry Camilla, and everyone accepted that it would be announced this winter."
That's highly unlikely now. With the inquest into Diana's death adjourned for at least a year to give police time to examine the conspiracy theories, her own included, it's unlikely to happen for a very long time. If ever.
It has been reported that Charles will have to meet at some stage this year with Sir John Stevens, the London Police Commissioner who will head the investigation.
The heir to the throne being questioned on possible involvement in the murder of his wife?
Yes, things could get worse.
It's a very deep ocean"