Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has controversially broken royal protocol and claimed in his upcoming memoir that Queen Elizabeth II was suffering from bone cancer before her death, CNN reports.
In the book, which hits shelves on October 10 and has been serialized this week in the Daily Mail newspaper – which Johnson also writes for – he recalled the monarch’s final days at Balmoral, Scotland.
Johnson formally stepped down just two days before Elizabeth II’s death in September 2022, and in the years since, there has been fierce speculation over exactly how she passed away.
“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,” he wrote in the excerpt.
Johnson’s account is the first public indication by a former senior government official as to what the Queen’s cause of death might have been. It is listed as “old age” on her death certificate.
