She was bright and focused in our last meeting, ref lects Boris
BORIS Johnson has said the Queen was ‘bright’ with ‘extraordinary’ focus in their final meeting just two days before her death.
Mr Johnson met the Queen in Balmoral to formally resign as prime minister to make way for Liz Truss on September 6.
In an interview with the BBC last night the former prime minister said: ‘The last audience I had with her – one of the reasons that it was so shocking... to hear about her death was because in that audience she had been absolutely on it – just two days before her death.’
He added: ‘She was actively focused on geopolitics, on UK politics, quoting statesmen from the 1950s. It was quite extraordinary.’
Asked if the Queen seemed well, Mr Johnson hesitated and replied: ‘She seemed very bright, very focused.
‘Look, she was clearly not well and I think that was the thing that I found so moving when I heard about her death two days later – I just thought how incredible that her sense of duty had kept her going in the way that it had.
‘Given how ill she obviously was, how amazing that she should be so bright and so focused – so it was a pretty emotional time.’ Mr Johnson said he felt ‘this slightly inexplicable excess of emotion’ when he heard that the Queen had died.
‘Speaking entirely personally, for me it was a colossal thing,’ he told the BBC.
The day after holding audiences with Mr Johnson and Miss Truss, the Queen postponed a virtual Privy Council after doctors ordered her to rest after her ‘full day’.
Mr Johnson was also asked during the interview if he was ever too busy to attend his weekly audience with the Queen. But he replied: ‘No, you must be joking,’ and went on to describe his regular meetings with her as ‘a fantastic break from everything else’ and ‘a wonderful moment of tranquillity’.
He said ‘just about everything under the sun’ was discussed at the audiences, but that he never spoke about Partygate.
‘Because of her great sense of constitutional function she never got into that sort of conversation,’ Mr Johnson said.
‘She was really absolutely focused on what she saw as the important issues. It’s a very trusting environment, the audience with Her Majesty. So that never came up.’
The ex-PM was also asked whether Charles would be different as King to the Queen.
‘I don’t know that he will necessarily will be different in a fundamental way,’ Mr Johnson said.
He described the succession as ‘absolutely flawless’.
Mr Johnson also used the interview to repeat his call for the late Queen to be known as ‘Elizabeth the Great’ because of the ‘sweep of progress’ over the past 70 years.
‘That’s why I think she should be Elizabeth the Great, by the way, because look at what happened to this country in her reign,’ he said.
‘The immeasurable advances in prosperity and opportunity and longevity, whatever your metric is.’
The Queen’s death was announced at 6.30pm on Thursday, but Buckingham Palace gave no cause – saying only that she ‘died peacefully at Balmoral’.
‘She was quoting 1950s statesmen’