The British royal family in 2025: 'It's going to be very difficult in the coming months'

EXCLUSIVE: This year will go down in history as one of the most challenging and unprecedented periods for the British royal family following the cancer diagnoses of both King Charles and the Princess of Wales.

As so many of us do around December 31 and into January, the House of Windsor is no doubt hoping for a brighter year ahead.

Thankfully, 2025 is looking more positive with the King hoping to resume twice-yearly overseas trips with the Queen – subject to doctors' approval – with visits to Italy and India pencilled in.

Watch the video above.

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But ITV royal editor Chris Ship says the year ahead will likely throw up its "challenges".

"2025 is still going to present some challenges until the King is out of the woods," Ship tells 9honey, referring to the monarch's cancer.

"It's still going to be very difficult for him in the coming months. He won't be able to do everything that he would have wanted to do.

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"He won't be able to make as many changes as he wanted to make as King.

"No one's going to predict how long his reign will last, of course, but he's always going to have a much shorter reign than his mother had before him."

The Princess of Wales steadily increased her public duties towards the end of this year after ending chemotherapy in August.

Many royal watchers hope Catherine will return to full-time work in the coming months.

The princess is due to celebrate her 43rd birthday on January 9.

"We hope to see Kate back at work in a much more active way, but no one's going to put any pressure on her," Ship says.

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"But the King is still going to be under doctor's orders to take things easy because of his age and also because of his ongoing cancer treatment."

The dual cancer diagnoses of the King and Princess of Wales was something no-one saw coming.

"It's very difficult to predict 2025 because if you had asked me to predict 2024 I wouldn't have said we'd have two members of the royal family having cancer treatment," Ship says.

"I wouldn't have said that they would have been both off at the same time.

"In fact, there was one point when Kate and the King were being treated in the very same hospital.

"And as you know, we later found out they both have some form of cancer."

There is one big event happening in early 2025 which Ship can say with certainty: the British royal family is expanding.

Princess Beatrice is due to give birth to her second child with husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi.

The baby will be born 11th in line to the British throne and is due anytime from March.

The newborn will be a younger sibling for Sienna, three, and Christopher – known as Wolfie – Mozzi's eight-year-old son from his previous relationship.

"A new royal baby is always something to look forward to no matter where they appear in the line of succession," Ship says.

He says it is "a really exciting time for that family".

"Of course, the Yorks have been through some very difficult times with all the negative headlines around Prince Andrew and he's still very much kept away from the limelight and you think about the impact that must have had on his two daughters, on Beatrice and Eugenie.

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All the defining photos of the British royal family in 2024

"I don't think we can underestimate the scale of that, of the impact of all of those headlines and their father's reputation being shredded in the way that it has been.

"But for Prince Andrew and the Duchess of York [it is a] a really exciting time for that family to have a another grandchild on the way."

As for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Ship previously told 9honey: "There are so many things up in the air with the Sussexes".

"There's the issue with Harry's family, what are they going to do with their contract with Netflix? What kind of things are they going to produce?

"No one really knows what Harry and Meghan's future plans are, where they're going to be. It's a very uncertain and unpredictable future, I think.

"Only Harry and Meghan know what their plans are… or maybe they don't either."

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