Boris Johnson is the latest public figure to release a memoir, and in his upcoming book, Unleashed—serialized in the Daily Mail on Sept. 28—the former U.K. prime minister shares that Queen Elizabeth was suffering from "bone cancer" before her 2022 death.
In an excerpt from his memoir, Johnson writes that he'd visited Balmoral on Sept. 6, just two days before the monarch died, to hold one final meeting with Queen Elizabeth before he left office as prime minister.
"Edward Young, her private secretary, tried to prepare me," he wrote, adding, "I had known for a year or more that she had a form of bone cancer, and her doctors were worried that at any time she could enter a sharp decline."
Johnson said that he was told the Queen had "gone down quite a bit over the summer," but mentally she "was completely unimpaired by her illness." The former PM noted that although she was unwell, the monarch "still flashed that great white smile in its sudden mood-lifting beauty" during their conversation.
Queen Elizabeth's official cause of death was listed as "old age" on her death certificate, with Buckingham Palace declining to comment further on the matter.
Boris Johnson served as prime minister from 2019 to 2022.
Johnson's memoir is the second book to contain claims that Queen Elizabeth was suffering from cancer. Last year, author Gyles Brandreth's wrote in his biography, Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait, that the Queen was battling a bone marrow cancer known as myeloma.
As for Johnson, he wrote that during his time as prime minister, "to go to see the Queen, for an hour a week, and to pour out your heart was more than a privilege. It was a balm, a form of free psychotherapy."
He described their meetings as "like being at school and being taken out to tea by a much-loved grandmother," sharing that Queen Elizabeth "radiated such an ethic of service, patience and leadership that you really felt you would, if necessary, die for her."
"That may sound barmy to some people (and totally obvious to many more), but that loyalty, primitive as it may appear, is still at the heart of our system," Johnson wrote.
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