Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has shared a sad claim about Queen Elizabeth and her secret health battle that she was going through before her death in 2022.
Johnson reflected on his relationship with the former monarch in his upcoming memoir, Unleashed, detailing his final meeting with the Queen at Balmoral Castle just days before she died.
In the book, he explained that the Queen had been battling bone cancer and was worried about the deterioration of her condition.
“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 wrote in an excerpt obtained by the Daily Mail.
Before their meeting, Johnson claimed the Queen’s private secretary, Edward Young, warned him that her health had “gone down quite a bit over the summer.”
“She seemed pale and more stooped, and she had dark bruising on her hands and wrists, probably from drips or injections,” Johnson wrote.
He continued, “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.”
Queen Elizabeth died just two days after their final meeting.
According to Johnson, 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 successor Liz Truss.
Johnson isn’t the first person to have claimed the late monarch was diagnosed with cancer during her final years, as royal author Gyles Brandreth wrote about rumours Her Majesty had a rare form of myeloma, a bone marrow cancer, in his book, Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait.
He explained that the diagnosis “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, the Queen’s official cause of death was listed as “old age” and the palace has never disclosed any other medical records.
Image credits: Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street/UPI/Shutterstock Editorial