cptjeff: cgraves67: I have to believe that it's easier being the heir than being the king. I don't know what the monarch's responsibilities are these days other than attending events and waving to the subjects, but the heir's responsibilities must be far less.

Well, the Queen stays fully appraised of the operations of her government, even the covert ones, has a completely private and off the record conversation with the PM weekly, and takes care of all the highest level state and ceremonial occasions, though many of those involve a fair chunk of the royal family too. Lower level stuff gets farmed out to the rest of the royals, which allows serious national heavyweights to reach a range of events and occasions that would be just about impossible in a place like the US where the the Head of State role is only secondary to a much more demanding Head of Government role. Being able to focus on those things full time and having more people to draw on to do them means they get to a lot of shop openings, weddings, and really small scale stuff, which has a huge effect on building a unified nation. (As opposed to State).

But yeah- Prince Charles's job isn't that different from his Mother's at this point, except that she has a lot more mandatory ceremonial jobs that require a lot of coordination and planning, and she's responsible for being the institutional memory for the UK and providing candid advice to the PM with an in depth knowledge of the activities of the British Government going back to Winston Churchill.

She's also the one who handles the state occasions that are a little more sensitive diplomatically- she was the one behind that State visit to Ireland recently and the subsequent reconciliation with the guy who was the head of the IRA at one point.