It was September 2019, not long after I became prime minister, when I first stayed at Balmoral. I went with Carrie, and there was the gentlest suggestion in some of the papers that Her Majesty might look askance at an unmarried PM arriving to stay with his girlfriend. Would we be allowed to sleep in the same Âbedroom? they asked.
As anyone could have predicted, the Queen did not give a monkey’s about any of this. (Though we were advised against bringing Dilyn the dog. Apparently, ÂPrincess Anne had once brought some dogs and they killed a corgi.)
Balmoral was a curiously calming Âexperience, mainly because it was so Âsurreal. It wasn’t just this great ÂGormenghast of a castle, with its endless antlered corridors. It was the fact that we were in the monarch’s home and she was treating us as her guests, looking after us and making sure we had a good time.
Boris and wife Carrie with the Queen at the Eden Project for the G7 summit in Cornwall in 2021
The Queen driving her Range Rover on a public road near the Sandringham estate in 2020
I had to pinch myself as the then 93-year-old monarch drove us at top speed in her Range Rover, bouncing up an unmade road with the moon shining on the moors.
We reached a bothy, once a favourite of Queen Victoria, and it felt so paradoxical, so topsy-turvy, to watch the Queen bustle around and make her special vinaigrette and lay out the elements of the picnic in their Tupperware boxes.
The Duke of Edinburgh fired up his enormous steel barbecue – which he had designed and made himself – and after supper he and I talked for a while by the fire, about the disasters of human demography and the loss of the natural world.
Finally, we were summoned outside, where a torchlit procession of pipers had appeared. I will never forget the sparks of the torches flying upwards into the night sky, and Her Majesty watching her piper intently, beaming, and tapping time with her foot.
Of course, at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics Her Majesty had Âstolen the show.
Danny Boyle, the director of Slumdog Millionaire, had Âproduced a stirring pageant of all that is great about Britain.
The Queen with Daniel Craig in the sketch from the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony
The monarch then appeared to leap from the Âhelicopter in her pink dress and parachute down to the stadium
The Queen appeared – through Boyle’s trickery – to have been summoned from her desk at ÂBuckingham Palace by Daniel Craig, aka James Bond 007, and then flown across London in a Âhelicopter to hover above us, and then, to the joy and shock of the heads of state and government around me, to leap from the Âhelicopter in her pink dress and parachute down to join us.
The following morning it was my happy duty to show her around the rest of the Olympic Park, and she was very keen to know if people had enjoyed the performance.
‘Did they think it was funny?’ she asked.
‘Ma’am,’ I said, with Disraelian unctuousness, ‘the reviews have been uniformly terrific.’
It was one of those dreich* days in Scotland with the leaves just beginning to turn, and the mist coming off the wide brown River Dee. A solitary cagoule-
clad Âcameraman recorded our entry through the gates of ÂBalmoral Castle.
Like all my 13 predecessors, I had come to spend the last hour of my premiership in the company of Queen Elizabeth II. The date was September 6, 2022, more than two months after I had resigned as prime minister, and under our Âsystem I had been required to stay on and mind the shop while the Conservative Party got on with choosing a new leader.
It had been a rather frustrating summer. The Downing Street operations team had tried Âvaliantly to keep me occupied but authority forgets a dying king. I couldn’t drive things through in the way I wanted. I was in the spacey mood of someone who just wants to get it over.
When Carrie and I got to ÂBalmoral, we were shown into a library and stood around for quite a while and had coffee.
I tried a few jolly remarks with the courtiers, about the kind of advice I might give to Her ÂMajesty, about who she might really send for to be PM; that kind of thing.
They smiled. But they looked tired. Edward Young, her private secretary, tried to prepare me.
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 Âopposite 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 Âbruising on her hands and wrists, probably from drips or injections.
But her mind – as Edward had also said – was completely Âunimpaired by her illness, and from time to time in our Âconversation she still flashed that great white smile in its sudden mood-lifting beauty.
To go to see the Queen, for an hour a week, and to pour out your heart was 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.
Mr Johnson says at Balmoral ‘we were in the monarch’s home and she was treating us as her guests, looking after us and making sure we had a good time’
I felt there was nothing I could not tell her, and her genius – as I gave her my descriptions of Âgovernment infighting or foreign chicanery – was to sound both understanding and sympathetic, and then, at just the right moment, to give the tiniest nudge of advice.
Whatever crisis you laid before her – like one of her dogs finding something revolting on the moor and putting it on the carpet – she had seen worse.
On one occasion I was Âbelly-aching about the miseries of Covid, the human toll and the awful economic consequences.
‘Oh well,’ she said briskly, ‘I suppose we will all just have to start again.’
I realised that she spoke with the historical knowledge of someone who had actually served in uniform in the Second World War, and whose first PM was Winston Churchill. She knew her kingdom was infinitely capable of rebounding and recovering. We just needed to get a grip, and get on with it.
She radiated such an ethic of Âservice, patience and leadership that you really felt you would, if necessary, die for her.
That may sound barmy to some people (and totally obvious to many more), but that loyalty, primitive as it may appear, is still at the heart of our system.
You need someone kind and wise, and above politics, to personify what is good about our country. She did that job brilliantly.
She had a deep personal Âknowledge, not just of history but of Âhistory-makers. In her 70-year reign, she had met all the people who really made the modern world: from Charles de Gaulle to Emmanuel Macron, from Harry Truman to Joe Biden, from Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping (whose security goons, much to her indignation, had once tried to infiltrate her royal coach).
If I forgot the name of George II’s battle or the late prime minister of Zambia, she would immediately snap ‘Dettingen’ or ‘Kenneth Kaunda’, like a pub quiz winner.
Sometimes she even seemed to know things before I had been briefed.
It was she who broke it to me that a very expensive RAF F-35 fighter plane had blown a gasket and dropped off its aircraft carrier and into the drink because someone had left a plastic tray over the air intake. Doubly embarrassing to hear it from the Queen.
The Queen welcomes Mr Johnson as he is sworn in as prime minister in 2019
Today, on the day of my formal resignation, we talked, among other things, about Ukraine. I mentioned our difficulties in persuading our Indian friends to take a tougher line with the Russians. She remembered something the former Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru had said to her in the 1950s. ‘He told me that India will always side with Russia, and that some things will never change. They just are.’
I cite that as an illustration of her amazing ability to reassure and to contextualise.
Two days later she died.
As Edward Young explained to me later, she had known all Âsummer 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.
She gave me at least two bits of crucial advice. Without offending convention, I think I can pass them on. She was surprised by my Âgeneral lack of bitterness, given what had happened in WestÂminster, but she approved.
‘There’s no point in bitterness,’ she said, and amen to that. If everyone in politics – and life – could see that as clearly as she did, the world would be a much, much happier place.
The other piece of advice Âconcerned magpies, after I Âadmitted that I was neurotic about seeing single magpies because they brought bad luck.
Ah yes, said the Queen. She was exactly the same. But she had an apotropaic** ritual for banishing the curse.
‘If you see a single magpie, you just say, good morning Mr Magpie, today is Monday the 12th of March – or whatever the date is. That sorts it out.’
There, in case anyone else is in need of similar comfort on how to make your own luck, is a tip from the absolute top.
Dictionary corner
* Dreich – wet, dark, gloomy weather (mainly Scottish)
** Apotropaic – protection against bad luck
Her cheeky remark about Macron’s wife
French president Emmanuel Macron with his wife Brigitte at the G7 summit in Cornwall in 2021
Mr Johnson with the monarch and Mr Macron at the event
I can’t, of course, say anything about her political views, whether on Brexit or anything else, though sometimes they were pretty clear.Â
What I can say is that in all my time she was never less than encouraging and supportive – and she had a stern maxim for decision-makers.Â
As she once said to me in one of our sessions: ‘It’s not about being popular, it’s about being useful.’
Once, discussing a G7 meeting with her, I explained how I had raised with President Macron of France the argument Britain was having with the European Commission, which was blocking the movement of everyday goods such as bacon and sausages from the island of Britain to Northern Ireland.
He frowned in puzzlement. ‘But Northern Ireland is a different country,’ he said. ‘It is reasonable to have checks.’
I almost lost it. The whole point about Northern Ireland is that it is NOT a different country; it is part of the United Kingdom, I said.
The Queen, who had met all the G7 leaders and their wives at a splendid dinner, observed that there seemed to be an interesting age gap between M. and Mme Macron.
‘Yes’, I said, ‘he married his teacher.’
‘Well,’ said the Queen, ‘she didn’t teach him much history.’
Adapted from Unleashed by Boris Johnson (William Collins, £30), to be published on October 10. © Boris Johnson 2024. To order a copy for £25.50 (offer valid until October 12, 2024; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
Boris Johnson will be in conversation with Gyles Brandreth at The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, on October 12.
