Queen Elizabeth II secretly fought excruciating cancer battle before death, book claims
Queen Elizabeth II was suffering from bone cancer when she died, Boris Johnson has claimed.
The former monarch’s cause of death was given officially as “old age” after she passed away on September 8, 2022, at the age of 96.
Writing in his memoir Unleashed, Mr Johnson recalled a meeting at Balmoral on September 6, the day he stopped being Prime Minister.
He said: “Edward Young, her private secretary, tried to prepare me. 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.
“‘She’s gone down quite a bit over the summer,’ he said. And then the footman knocked and showed me into Her Majesty’s drawing room.
Good morning, Prime Minister,’ she said, and as we sat down opposite one another on the greeny-blue sofas I 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.
“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.”
Discussing the events that forced him out of Number 10, he said the former Queen told him: “There’s no point in bitterness.”
Mr Johnson also revealed that Queen Elizabeth had been happy for him to share a room with wife Carrie before the pair were married, during a 2019 Balmoral visit.
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He said: “There was the gentlest suggestion in some of the papers that Her Majesty might look askance at an unmarried PM arriving to stay with his girlfriend. Would we be allowed to sleep in the same bedroom? they asked.
“As anyone could have predicted, the Queen did not give a monkey’s about any of this.”
The Express has contacted Buckingham Palace for comment
