Despite my concerns about his obvious wokery and dangerous interventions into politics, I desperately want Charles III to succeed and, as a proud royalist, will happily pledge allegiance on Saturday to our new King.
I also believe Queen Camilla is a kind and well-intentioned woman with a good soul who never asked to be thrust into the midst of royal history by virtue of the man she happens to love.
But, for those of us who remain loyal to the memory of Princess Diana, the Coronation on Saturday poses an unprecedented moral challenge.
We know that until her dying breath, the then most famous woman in the world, now a forever icon, was vociferously opposed to the idea of Queen Camilla.
Her close friends have revealed the mere mention of such a prospect filled her with equal levels of punch-in-the-guts dread, immense upset and visceral anger.
‘I’d like to be a queen in people’s hearts but I don’t see myself being queen of this country,’ she declared in the now discredited Martin Bashir Panorama interview.
Indeed, she told former newspaper editor Sir Max Hastings around the same time that her entire focus was on the crown passing over Charles so that her young son William could succeed Queen Elizabeth II as monarch, no doubt in large part because of her understandable hatred of the other woman in her ‘crowded’ marriage.
While Diana’s broad base of tens of millions of ardent supporters may have softened over the past 25 years, with many accepting it is simply time to move on, new polling from Lord Ashcroft this week for the Daily Mail reveals I’m not alone in feeling uneasy.
His bombshell survey showed, days ahead of the Coronation, just 39 per cent of Brits have a favourable view of Camilla, making her the fourth least popular senior royal, behind only Harry, Meghan and Andrew.
Despite the mainstream media long ago accepting Camilla, in large part due to her good personal relations with reporters and editors, the public remains stubbornly unconvinced.