King Charles’ new portrait shows he is a monarch on a modern path

The King will use his 75th birthday next week to move the focus of his reign away from flummery, and onto tackling ingrained social issues such as homelessness and food poverty, says Hugo Vickers

King Charles will use his 75th birthday to launch his Coronation Food Project, to redistribute unused supermarket produce (Getty)

It’s the most unlikely of juxtapositions – the monarch, on the cover of a magazine handed out by the homeless.

Over the centuries, kings and queens have marked their birthdays with feasts of great splendour. So it comes as somewhat of a surprise that King Charles’s 75th birthday present to himself is to be photographed for The Big Issue.

But it also helps make clear where His Majesty’s priorities lie: not with pageantry, but with poverty – and not in banquets, but helping beggars.