Apologising for things other people did “really easy”, King confirms

As he nears the end of his tour of the Caribbean, which has seen pressure on him regarding Britain’s involvement in the slave trade, King Charles remarked to an aide how easy it is to apologise for things you didn’t do in the first place.

”It’s an absolute piece of piss,” remarked the monarch. “I can’t think why one didn’t do it years ago.'

”I mean, one’s basically saying that someone else - maybe even the person who had one’s job at the time - was a very bad hat who did something ghastly. Clearly implying that one is a much better person than they were. What’s so difficult about that?'

He went on to say he’d be more than happy to apologise for anything else done by one of his predecessors.

'The famines in Ireland and Bengal, the Amritsar massacre, concentration camps during the Boer War… actually, you’d better put one down for Jack the Ripper too, he was probably a relative.'

'But that’s all safely in the past. It doesn’t mean one’s going to apologise for what that idiot Andrew got up to with that bloody New York financier … and neither of course is he.'