“Everyone loved Jo. Except her husband.” He bludgeoned her to death in 2010. “With a claw hammer,” Joanna Simpson’s mother, Diana Parkes, explains. “Fourteen times he hit her.”
Her Majesty the Queen: Behind Closed Doors is full of such moments of breathtaking pain and cruelty, as it gives an account of Queen Camilla’s involvement with raising awareness of domestic and sexual violence – which began after the then queen consort met Parkes in 2016 and heard her and Joanna’s story. “It’s engraved on my heart,” she says, with unroyal frankness.
