Elizabeth II was a unique monarch in British history in that she spent her entire, extremely long, reign without a breath of personal scandal. Her family, on the other hand, have had and are having about the average number, going by former monarchs and their clans. Rather less, to the extent that, so far, none of them have tried bumping any of the others off (a common hobby among royalty and aristocrats)!
Of course Charles will annoy Daily Telegraph readers and commenters! He'll annoy Sun and Daily Mail readers as well. More power to him! That misbegotten alliance of retired Colonels, superannuated Chief Constables, dyspeptic judges, overfed Bishops, commuter-belt domestic tyrants, Captain Mainwarings, Hyacinth Buckets, Alf Garnetts and Del-Boys need to be annoyed out of existence!
Charles is trying to do what he's spent his life doing. Drawing together disparate groups with common problems, than asking them what they're going to do about said problems. That's how he revived the local and artisan cheese industry. It's how he turned the Duchy of Cornwall from a loss-making mess to a profitable concern. If people think that, as King, he's going to abandon everything he's devoted his life to, they've clearly misread the man!
I think and hope the monarchy will last. It has long been to our advantage that the power in the UK is vested in the instution of the Crown, of which the monarch is the representative. The Crown does nothing but give its servants authority to make and enforce law, A written Constitution, as we see in the US, leads to a 21st Century nation being run on principles evolved in the 18th Century. Otherwise it must be contantly updated, amended and redrawn, with a consequent lack of stability and proneness to power-grabbing.
A self-perpetuating system such as monarchy, which ensures that the Crown always has a representative ready to take over when one dies, is undoubtedly efficient. Nor does the system require any great measure of virtue, ability or intellect from said representatives. It doesn't even require them to be well-known. If you stripped away their ceremonial duties and just paid the reigning monarch the salary of a senior civil servant, the system would still function. But we would lose a lot of our national character, I think.
