Queen Elizabeth II had bone cancer and knew “all summer that she was going” before her death, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has revealed in his memoir.
Elizabeth was 96 years old and the U.K.’s longest reigning monarch when she died on September 8, 2022, at Balmoral, her Scottish estate.
Her official cause of death was recorded as “natural causes” but Johnson said she had bone cancer and was aware her time was nearly up.
In an extract his memoir, Unleashed, serialized in The Mail on Sunday, he described the last time he saw her alive when he formally resigned, two days before her death.
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“Edward Young, her private secretary, tried to prepare me,” Johnson wrote. “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.”
Johnson’s decision to reveal her diagnosis is likely to raise eyebrows at Buckingham Palace.
Aides have never said she had cancer and are normally fiercely defensive of the royal family’s medical privacy unless the royal in question chooses to reveal the details themselves.
King Charles was open about needing a procedure on his prostate and chose to reveal he had been diagnosed with cancer, but declined to reveal what kind.
Princess Kate was willing to reveal only the fact she had abdominal surgery, and was bounced into confirming she had a form of cancer some time after she was diagnosed and in the grip of a social media storm.
The palace has also never said publicly that the queen knew she was dying for months in advance.
“As Edward Young explained to me later,” Johnson wrote, “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.”
The Conservative Party politician is not the first person to publicly state that the queen had cancer, after royal historian Giles Brandreth made the claim in his own book.
But no matter how well connect Brandreth might be, nothing can come close to the level of inside information about the royal family given to a serving prime minister.
“I had heard that the Queen had a form of myeloma—bone marrow cancer,” Brandreth wrote in Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait, in 2022. “The most common symptom of myeloma is bone pain, especially in the pelvis and lower back, and multiple myeloma is a disease that often affects the elderly.
“Currently, there is no known cure, but treatment—including medicines to help regulate the immune system and drugs that help prevent the weakening of the bones—can reduce the severity of its symptoms and extend the patient’s survival by months or two to three years.”
Dickie Arbiter, the queen’s former spokesperson, gave an indication of the extent of the monarchy’s expectation of privacy when he told Newsweek at the time of Brandreth’s book: “I don’t think anybody knows what it was. The death certificate said ‘old age.’
“I don’t think anyone can confirm whether she did or she didn’t [have cancer]. It’s a conversation that [King] Charles had with a doctor who said, ‘I believe that.’ So he didn’t know either. We certainly won’t know anything for the next 100 years.”
Royal documents filed at the National Archives remain secret from the public for 100 years, compared to government documents, which are made available after 20 years.
Jack Royston is chief royal correspondent for Newsweek, based in London. You can find him on X, formerly Twitter, at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek‘s The Royals Facebook page.
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