Your family would be so proud of you, Queen tells John Hunt and daughter Amy

The Queen has told BBC racing commentator John Hunt and his daughter Amy, whose family were murdered at their home, that they would be “so proud of you both”.

Louise Hunt, 25, her sister Hannah Hunt, 28, and their mother Carol Hunt, 61, were killed by Kyle Clifford, 27 – Louise’s ex-partner – in a quiet cul-de-sac in Bushey, Hertfordshire, on July 9 last year.

A fundraising gala was held earlier this month to launch The Hunt Family Fund.

Mr Hunt and Amy set up the fund in memory of Carol, Louise and Hannah to raise money for charities and causes that help and inspire young women.

Camilla said in the recording, which was broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I’d just like to say, wherever your family is now, they’d be so proud of you both.

“And they must be from above smiling down on you and thinking, my goodness me, what a wonderful, wonderful father, husband, sister.

“They’d just be so proud of you both.”

The discussion, which was recorded in the Garden Room at Clarence House last month, also included former prime minister Baroness Theresa May and was chaired by BBC broadcaster Emma Barnett.

The Queen recalled how she was “so angry” and “furious” when she was attacked on a train as a teenager.

Camilla said: “Somebody I didn’t know. I was reading my book, and you know, this boy, man, attacked me, and I did fight back.

“And I remember getting off the train and my mother looking at me and saying: ‘Why is your hair standing on end?’ and: ‘Why is button missing from your coat?’”

The incident was first recounted in the book Power And The Palace: The Inside Story Of The Monarchy And 10 Downing Street by Valentine Low, a former royal reporter for The Times newspaper.

After hearing the Queen share the story, Ms Hunt said: “Thank-you for sharing that story first, your majesty, because that takes a lot to share these things because every woman has a story.”

Camilla did “what my mother taught me” and took off her shoe to fend off the man as she travelled to London’s Paddington station in the early 1960s when aged 16 or 17, it was previously reported in an extract from the book.

Mr Hunt said a year on after his family was killed it “remains really difficult on a minute-by-minute basis”, adding “but you have to try and find the strength in our position to arm yourself with as many tools as possible that are going to help you get through that next hour, get through that next day”.

He added: “At the risk of embarrassing Amy, she’s been my best counsel from the word go.

“We talk all the time. I used to say ‘I couldn’t do it without you’, but now I say ‘I can do it with you’.”

Ms Hunt added: “I think there’s a huge part of us that’s still in disbelief, in shock. Perhaps we’ll be in that state for the rest of our lives, given the magnitude of our loss.

“We miss them every single minute of the day.”

The Queen spoke how she previously went to a meeting of charity SafeLives and heard the stories of women who had been killed or attacked.

She added: “I remember being just so shocked and horrified by the whole thing, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the place, and it made me realise how naive I’d been about this sort of thing. I mean, we read about it occasionally in the papers, but we don’t realise that it’s happening all the time.”

The Queen spoke about how it is important to work with potential future perpetrators early on and teach them respect for women.

She said: “We’ve got to get to the root of the matter, the perpetrators, especially when they’re young, they may have come from a circle, they may have had parents or relatives who’ve been abusive or done terrible things to them, and so they’re almost brought up to believe that it’s a natural thing to do.

“If you can get them early enough and teach them respect for women. I think that’s so important to get into schools.”

Amy added that the radicalisation of men by other men is a “huge problem”.

She said: “Unfortunately, it’s something that largely goes unchecked in these tech companies and social media companies, it’s somewhat allowed to run rampant.

“I suppose, if men have not had the best examples in life when they reach out to an online space looking for guidance and for some sort of mentor, these men in the online spaces such as Andrew Tate and his ilk, they provide that, and they provide easy answers.”

Baroness May said: “We’ve introduced the Online Safety Act here in the UK. It’s an attempt to do something to protect people from what goes online.

“But over the years, I’ve had many conversations in my time in government with the platforms, with the companies, to try and urge them to see the importance of the social responsibility, of the impact of what is going across their platforms.”