Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister of the UK, has claimed that the late Queen Elizabeth II was battling bone cancer in the final years of her life.
In an excerpt from Mr Johnson’s upcoming memoir Unleashed, first obtained by The Daily Mail, he reflects on the last time he saw the Queen – two days before she passed away in September 2022.
“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,” Mr Johnson wrote.
He went on to share that Queen Elizabeth’s private secretary Edward Young had warned him that she had “gone down quite a bit over the summer” and admitted that as soon as he saw Her Majesty, he could “see at once what Edward meant”.
“She seemed pale and more stooped, and she had dark bruising on her hands and wrists, probably from drips or injections,” Mr Johnson wrote.
“But her mind – as Edward had also said – was completely unimpaired by her illness, and from time to time in our conversation she still flashed that great white smile in its sudden mood-lifting beauty.”
Mr Johnson met with the Queen on September 6, 2022 to formally resign as leader of the Conservative Party.
And he wrote in Unleashed that Edward Young believed Queen Elizabeth knew she was going to die but didn’t want to until Liz Truss had been officially appointed as Mr Johnson’s successor.
“As Edward Young explained to me later, she had known all summer that she was going, but was determined to hang on and do her last duty: to oversee the peaceful and orderly transition from one government to the next – and, I expect, to add another departing PM to her record-breaking tally.”
This isn’t the first time someone has claimed the late Queen Elizabeth had bone cancer.
In the 2022 biography Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait, author Gyles Brandreth (a writer, broadcaster and former MP) wrote:
“I had heard that the Queen had a form of myeloma — bone marrow cancer — which would explain her tiredness and weight loss and those ‘mobility issues’ we were often told about during the last year or so of her life.”
However, Queen Elizabeth’s official death certificate listed her cause of death as “old age”.
