Camilla’s honesty reveals the good monarchy can do

Few of us, when learning of the murder of BBC racing commentator John Hunt’s family in Hertfordshire in July 2024, could comprehend the horror of it. His wife, Carol, was brutally stabbed multiple times, and two of his three daughters were murdered with a crossbow, in their own home.

The perpetrator — now serving a life sentence in jail — was Kyle Clifford, a former soldier and the ex-boyfriend of Hunt’s 25-year-old daughter Louise, whom Clifford tied up and raped not far from the body of her dead mother, before turning the crossbow on her while she was still tied up. She had ended her relationship with him two weeks before. Clifford then murdered Louise’s sister Hannah as she entered the house from the garden, where she was completely oblivious to the terror unfolding yards away in her home.

When such a cruel tragedy befalls a family, many soon turn away from the horror of it. Too distressing, too awkward; how do we voice our continued sympathy? But not the Queen. In a New Year’s Eve interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Queen Camilla, in her characteristically empathetic, no-nonsense way, spoke openly with John and his daughter Amy about their ongoing grief, shedding light on their campaign to combat domestic abuse and violence against women.

The Queen was speaking during a discussion on violence against women, in an episode of the programme guest-edited by former prime minister Theresa May. And she also talked publicly for the first time about her own attack at the hands of a young man on a train when she was just a teenager. She aptly described the anger many of us feel when sexually assaulted.

She recalled getting off the train and “my mother looking at me and saying, ‘Why is your hair standing on end and why is the button missing from your coat?’ I had been attacked. I was so furious about it, and ... when the subject (of) domestic abuse came up, and suddenly you hear a story like John and Amy’s, it’s something that I feel very strongly about.”

The Queen will be aware that her story is not directly comparable to that of the Hunt family. But she also knows that opening up about her own experience, given she is now the Queen of England, will further encourage women and young girls to call out misogyny, to see such behaviour as unacceptable — not something that should be shrugged off as somehow part and parcel of being a women, as it has so often been, with horrendous results. Take your pick — grooming gangs, the murder of Sarah Everard, continued misogyny in the Met police, and yes, Jeffrey Epstein.

As Amy acutely notes in response to Camilla: “Every woman has a story.” It would have been easy for the Queen to tackle a lighter subject, striking a cheerier note, with an end-of-a-challenging-year type message, especially given the dark cloud of Epstein and his long friendship with Andrew hovering over the royal family. The Queen’s honesty is in stark contrast to her brother-in-law’s approach. And her openness is part of a wider societal shift in calling out sex crimes.

She has also spent decades shouldering the attention her relationship with the King has endured, very rarely giving any insight into her private thoughts or life behind the glare. It was, in many ways, a remarkable intervention (while not for a moment underestimating the fortitude of the remaining Hunt family). She has rightly pushed aside old-fashioned royal protocol to help establish an authentic hard truth. Until this week, she had only described the incident in private to Boris Johnson, when he was London mayor. (Queen Camilla is patron of the domestic abuse charity SafeLives and has worked alongside a number of other organisations, including Refuge.) Details emerged only this year in Valentine Low’s book, Power and the Palace. But the story had been told secondhand by Guto Harri, Johnson’s former aide. It is right that she has described her experience directly, so it is not left as a line in someone else’s book.