Valentine Low’s eminently readable, behind-the-scenes book about the royals has been making headlines, including how Queen Camilla fended off a sexual assault when she was a teenager.
Power and the Palace, published next week and written by the former royal correspondent for The Times, explores the tangled relationship between the royals and the world of politics.
From nightcaps on the royal train to discussions over the Coronation budget, here are some of the most eye-catching anecdotes in the book:
Queen fought off sex attack
Queen Camilla fought off a sexual assault and got the perpetrator arrested, in an incident that took place on a train to London when she was a teenager in the 1960s, Low says in the book.
The author says the Queen told Boris Johnson the story of her experience in 2008 when he was mayor of London. Johnson’s former communications director, Guto Harri, told Low the details of that conversation.
“I did what my mother taught me to. I took off my shoe and whacked him in the nuts with the heel,” Camilla is said to have told Johnson.
According to this account, Camilla 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”.
Buckingham Palace has a policy of not commenting on claims in books.
But a source close to the Queen said: “If some good comes of this publication, which is that the wider issues are discussed, it de-stigmatises the whole topic and empowers girls today to take action and seek help and to talk about it, then that’s a good outcome.”
It’s a story that certainly is in keeping with Queen Camilla’s outspoken campaigning against domestic abuse and violence against women.
She has visited women’s refuges, challenged the taboos surrounding domestic abuse and at a reception for International Women’s Day held up stones that in 1914 had been thrown by suffragettes to break windows in Buckingham Palace.
Royal nightcap whisky
Michael Gove, while he was environment secretary in 2018, was said to have been invited for a late drink with the then Prince of Wales in the royal train – a dedicated train for monarchs since Queen Victoria’s reign.
The drink was a Laphroaig whisky – a smoky, peaty Scottish malt, like pouring a wistful but rather melancholy highland walk into a tumbler.
Gove, on a trip with the prince, was advised not to expect a big breakfast the next morning, with Charles said to prefer a “tiny little vase of fruit and then some pressed fruit juice concoction, sort of beetroot and ginger or whatever”.
King’s strained relationship with Johnson
Boris Johnson was late for a meeting in 2008 with the then Prince Charles because he’d travelled in the wrong direction on the London underground. He made sure he wouldn’t be late for the next meeting by going on his bike.
That seemed to amuse Camilla, but Charles and Johnson were said to have had a frosty relationship, including a dispute over his government’s plan to process asylum applications in Rwanda years later.
