Politics
Liam O'Dell
Sep 02, 2023
Reuters
If you thought former prime minister Boris Johnson’s speeches were weird, his latest column for the Daily Mail has revealed his nightmares are just as unusual – with one of them concerning running late for a meeting with the Queen and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh.
Although it was perhaps the monarch’s response which was the most bizarre, as the ex-Uxbridge and South Ruislip MP claims she replied with the question, “were you naked”, implying she had heard of this nightmare before.
Mr Johnson wrote: “It was because of her humanity and sympathy that you felt, as PM, that you could really open up to her, tell her absolutely everything, so that the audiences were a mixture between a tutorial and a confessional, with a bit of unpaid psychotherapy thrown in.
“I once told her I had a nightmare that I had been late for her and the duke.
“’Oh yes,’ she beamed, and I could tell that she had heard this one before, probably from other PMs. ‘Were you naked?’ she asked, because it turns out that is a common feature of such dreams.”
Interestingly – and perhaps unsurprisingly, given his political history – Mr Johnson doesn’t answer that question in his piece.
He also didn’t mention the fact that he was once accused of lying to the Queen about proroguing parliament – something he denies - but that probably would have ruined the sentimentality of the piece.
In other anecdotes shared by the ex-mayor of London, the Queen once let him exercise in the gardens of Buckingham Palace gardens, broke the news to him that an F-35 fighter had blown a gasket on an aircraft carrier, and helped distract his child when he interrupted an evening gathering with his hair “looking pretty manic”.
Runs in the family, then.
The column comes a week before the first anniversary of the Queen’s passing at Balmoral Castle in Scotland on 8 September last year.
Just two days prior, Mr Johnson had met the royal to tender his resignation as PM, following a string of scandals including the infamous Partygate affair.
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