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Buckingham Palace Has Shared That All Members Of The Royal Family Are Canceling Most Public Engagements — Here's Why

And it has nothing to do with the health of the royals.

Shortly after U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called an early parliamentary election for July 4, Buckingham Palace said that all members of the royal family were canceling most public engagements until after the vote to avoid doing anything that might divert attention from the campaign. Ignoring that precedent “would expose the monarch to allegations of political interference of an undemocratic nature, even if the intention of the refusal was to preserve the good functioning of democracy,” according to the Institute for Government, an independent think tank. The last time a British monarch unilaterally brought down a government that had a majority in the House of Commons was in November 1834, when King William IV dismissed Lord Melbourne because of concerns about radical reforms supported by some members of his administration.

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