Boris Johnson says the late Queen ‘had bone cancer’

Queen Elizabeth II was suffering from bone cancer in the years leading up to her death, Boris Johnson has said.
The former British prime minister wrote about Her late Majesty’s health in his memoir, detailing his meeting with the monarch two days before she died.
He’s not the first public figure to speculate that the late Queen had cancer, but Johnson has given extraordinary detail about the last days of Elizabeth II.
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Johnson travelled to Balmoral, in Scotland, to tender his resignation to the Queen in September, 2022. His successor, Liz Truss, was formally appointed by the monarch that same day, on September 6.
Her late Majesty died at Balmoral two days later, on September 8.
Writing in his memoir, Unleashed, the former PM says he was told to wait in the library by the royal household staff, who he said “looked tired”.
The Queen’s private secretary, Edward Young, “tried to prepare me”, he says.
Johnson writes: “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.
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“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.”
Johnson says his regular meetings with the Queen during his time as PM were “more than a privilege”.
“It was a balm, a form of free psychotherapy. It was like being at school and being taken out to tea by a much-loved grandmother.”
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In September this year, two year’s since the Queen’s death, her former riding companion spoke about the monarch’s failing health.
Terry Pendry worked as the Queen’s stud groom for 28 and a half years and accompanied the monarch on her regular rides around Windsor.
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On most days he accompanied her on her ride – initially on horses, then, in her later years, on her beloved pony Emma.
Speaking on Gyles Brandreth’s Rosebud podcast last month, Pendry described having to add another step to the Queen’s riding block each year as she aged, so that she could comfortably mount Emma.
He said in her final years, the Queen had become so frail, he had to lift her off afterwards.
Pendry said he knew that the Queen was sick because “she was getting lighter and lighter and frailer and frailer”.
They last rode together on July 18, the day before the monarch departed for Balmoral where she would later pass away.
Pendry and Emma paid tribute to the Queen as her coffin made its way into the gates of Windsor Castle for her committal service.
In the months after the Queen’s death Brandreth, who was a friend of the late queen and her husband, Prince Philip, said the monarch “had a form of myeloma,” or bone marrow cancer.
He made the claim in his book, Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait, writing the illness “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’.
The official death certificate listed old age as being the cause of death.
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