Queen Camilla was a victim of an attempted sexual assault as a teenager and used the heel of her shoe to fight off her attacker, a new book about the monarchy has claimed.
According to Power and the Palace, serialised in the Sunday Times, the queen told Boris Johnson about the attack while he was mayor of London, a position he held from 2008 to 2016.
Valentine Low, the book’s author and a former royal correspondent for the Times, spoke to Johnson’s former communications director Guto Harri, who recalled the future prime minister telling him about the meeting that took place at Clarence House in about 2008.
In an extract from the book, Harri said the pair “got on like a house on fire”, with Johnson making “guttural noises” about how much he admired and liked Camilla.
He added: “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 …”
Harri said that after Johnson asked what she did next, she had replied: “I did what my mother taught me to. I took off my shoe and whacked him in the nuts with the heel.”
Harri added: “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 queen, 78, has long campaigned against domestic violence and sexual abuse, and has dedicated her royal charity work to supporting victims of sexual assault.
A number of years ago she championed the idea of washbags for people who have been attacked, an idea that has recently been revived.