Royal reporter Valentine Low has written a new book called Power and the Palace. The Times of London is publishing excerpts, even though the Times sh-tcanned Low a few years ago. He outlived his usefulness for the royal courts – Low eagerly did their bidding when it came to the “bullying accusations” against the Duchess of Sussex, then the Times had to basically bury all of the follow-up information, about how no one in Kensington Palace actually accused Meghan on the record of bullying them. Low didn’t just do KP’s bidding about Meghan – if you read his reporting closely, it was clear that Buckingham Palace left their fingerprints all over the smear campaign too. In any case, Low is back with a new book and he’s breaking some news about Queen Camilla. In 2008, Camilla told Boris Johnson that she had been sexually assaulted as a teenager.

Johnson got on a lot better with the Duchess of Cornwall, who had a remarkably frank conversation with him in his early days as mayor. Some months after his first unfortunate audience with Prince Charles, Johnson was invited to Clarence House to meet Camilla. She had apparently told Charles, “He looks like such fun. Can we have him over for tea?” This time there was no risking the Tube; he and Harri cycled from City Hall. They were parking their bikes in the shed at the back of Clarence House when the duchess appeared, saying, “Oh, I didn’t believe them when they said you had cycled!” Harri recalled: “She had come out to the bike shed to see us. We drop the bikes, she grabs him by the wrist and says, ‘You and me, upstairs — now!’”

After an hour Johnson reappeared. “Boris was raving about her,” Harri said. “They obviously got on like a house on fire. He was making guttural noises about how much he admired and liked her. But the serious conversation they had was about her being the victim of an attempted sexual assault when she was a schoolgirl. She was on a train going to Paddington — she was about 16, 17 — and some guy was moving his hand further and further …” At that point Johnson had asked what happened next. She replied: “I did what my mother taught me to. I took off my shoe and whacked him in the nuts with the heel.” Harri said: “She was self-possessed enough when they arrived at Paddington to jump off the train, find a guy in uniform and say, ‘That man just attacked me’, and he was arrested.”

The relevance of this conversation was that Johnson at the time wanted to open three rape crisis centres. There was already one in south London, and he wanted to open ones in east, west and north London. Harri said: “I think she formally opened two out of three of them. Nobody asked why the interest, why the commitment. But that’s what it went back to.”

[From The Times]

While I usually don’t give Camilla credit for much, I’ve always given her work in this area a lot of respect. As I’ve pointed out before, it would have been easy enough for Camilla to just take on soft-focus charity work involving dogs, seniors and gardens. Instead, Camilla has spent a good chunk of the past twenty years working as a patron to rape-crisis centers, battered-women shelters and other survivor-network groups. It makes sense that the root of her concern was something that happened to her when she was a young woman. This was before these discussions were even happening too – this would have happened in the 1960s, before “crisis centers” were even a thing.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.