Queen Elizabeth died after suffering bone cancer, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson claims
The ex-Conservative leader, 60, met the monarch, who died aged 96 in September 2022 at Balmoral Castle in Scotland - two days after she met Boris at her beloved home there
3 October 2024
He says in his upcoming memoir 'Unleashed' about his final meeting with the Queen: "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."
Before his final meeting with Her Majesty, Boris said the Queen's private secretary Edward Young warned him her health had "gone down quite a bit over the summer".
He added in his book, which is being serialised by the Daily Mail: "She seemed pale and more stooped, and she had dark ¬bruising on her hands and wrists, probably from drips or injections.
"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."
Boris also said the Queen had "known all ¬summer that she was going" but was "determined to hang on and do her last duty" by overseeing the "peaceful and orderly transition" of power from him to his Prime Minister successor Liz Truss.
Boris formally resigned from his job as PM during his meeting with the Queen, after becoming the 14thBritish leader of her reign.
He also tells in his book the final piece of advice she gave him, which he said was: "There's no point in bitterness".
He added: "And amen to that. If everyone in politics - and life - could see that as clearly as she did, the world would be a much, much happier place."
Royal author Gyles Brandreth, 76, has also written about how the Queen had a rare form of myeloma - a bone marrow cancer - before her death in his 2022 book 'Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait'.
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