A new report claims that King Charles was initially hesitant to host Donald Trump during his September 2025 U.K. visit. According to multiple sources, the monarch was “jittery” about the visit following the tense public exchange between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky earlier that year.
King Charles reportedly didn’t want to host Donald Trump in UK
Donald Trump made a state visit to the U.K. in September 2025 with his wife, Melania Trump. The president stayed at Windsor Castle, with King Charles III and Queen Camilla. However, according to a recent report by The i Paper, the monarch was originally “reticent” about hosting Trump.
The outlet has cited multiple senior Whitehall sources, one of whom said that King Charles was “jittery” about the visit. Another insider put it more bluntly, saying that the sovereign “did not want to do it.” According to the report, the King was hesitant because of Trump’s earlier treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during his visit to the White House in February 2025.
Trump and VP JD Vance accused Zelensky of being “disrespectful,” leading to a tense public confrontation in the Oval Office. Thus, King Charles reportedly became reluctant to move forward with the planned visit.
The i Paper goes on to mention the efforts by U.K. officials to prevent “a full-blown diplomatic crisis” between the two nations. The report states that a “flurry of emails and texts” was exchanged between Peter Mandelson, then-US ambassador, and officials in March 2025. The messages offer a peek into the “behind-the-scenes diplomatic scramble to alleviate Charles’s concerns over the visit.”
Mandelson reportedly sent a message to the Foreign Office’s most senior civil servant, thanking him for his “cool handling of the last 48 hours on the SV [State Visit].” The texts and emails that were exchanged between March 14 and March 19 were released as part of the “so-called Mandelson files.”
According to the i Paper report, the files “contained hundreds of private WhatsApp messages and email exchanges between Mandelson and current and former Cabinet ministers, senior civil servants and advisers.”
