What was the late Queen REALLY like? Did Larry the No10 cat and Dilyn get on? Have you seen proof that aliens are on the market? Here are the solutions to the questions I’m most requested as a former PM

By Boris Johnson

16:49 22 Dec 2023, up to date 18:08 22 Dec 2023

Go on, they are saying. You should know the reality. You can inform us now – GO ON! One of the nice issues about being an ex-Prime Minister is that individuals assume you’re the repository of all kinds of top-secret data.

You have the reply, they think about, to the questions which were nagging them for years. They will be actually very persistent, and there are three subjects that appear to return up time and again.

There is after all Her late Majesty the Queen, who nonetheless arouses a world ­curiosity that’s completely insatiable. People are agog to know what she was actually like, and fall upon the slightest element as if it have been gold.

So throughout the limits of the Privy Council oath, I attempt to oblige. I can usually fulfill them with some low-grade intelligence in regards to the environment at these Balmoral barbecues — innocent nonsense about Tupperware or the key elements of the Queen’s French dressing, that sort of factor, and the dialog drifts on. The subsequent hottest topic is the true character and habits of Larry, the world-famous Downing Street cat. What’s he actually like? they are saying. Come on?

Since Larry is just not protected by any doctrine of confidentiality, I give them the sobering reality: that Larry, for my part, is a little bit of a thug.

I say this as a result of our canine Dilyn went a number of instances to Larry’s lair, and Larry being out on the time Dilyn determined — solely naturally and fairly — to eat his meals. The reprisals have been horrible.

If you look carefully at Larry, you possibly can see that he’s constructed like a sumo wrestler. He additionally has the talons of a velociraptor, and he’s a type of cats who not solely likes his meals but additionally takes a dim view of anybody else who tries to scoff it.

Have you ever reached out idly in a pub to take a chip from another person’s plate, and located your self unexpectedly stabbed within the hand by a fork? That is the sort of response that Dilyn provoked from the Downing Street mouser.

The poor canine was fairly badly mauled. In reality, he turned so petrified of Larry that he would refuse to go to the doorway corridor of No 10, or the hall resulting in the Cabinet Room — anyplace he would possibly come throughout Catzilla; and if I attempted to tug him on his lead, he would flatten himself on the ground like a bushy rug and whimper piteously.

Then Larry would stalk out in the direction of us, arching his again like Sydney Harbour Bridge, and screeching at Dilyn, who was by now such a gibbering wreck that I needed to choose him up and carry him to security.

If legions of Larry followers are shocked by this portrait of the well-known feline — effectively, I believe the general public have a proper to know the reality, and I’ve no hesitation in filling them in on Larry and his character, as a result of I can converse with some authority.

Then there’s the third massive topic — the query that for some purpose folks have been asking extra ceaselessly within the final couple of months.

Go on, they are saying. I guess you realize the reply. I guess you may have seen the actual, extremely hush-hush information, the 5 star strap materials.

Here, Boris, they are saying — cough it up. Do aliens truly exist — sure or no? You imply little inexperienced males? I say. Yes, they are saying.

I wish to stress that each one these questions strike me as cheap. We are a nation of monarchists: after all we wish to know in regards to the Queen — the actual human being who for therefore lengthy symbolised and personified our complete nation.

Of course we wish to learn about Larry, since we’re all animal lovers, and know that cats can have all kinds of temperaments.

We are additionally rationalists, empiricists, and the extra we study in regards to the Cosmos the extra puzzling all of it appears to be.

There are mentioned to be roughly 200 billion trillion stars within the Universe, and a good better variety of planets and asteroids and different clods and clumps of matter. Are we actually imagined to consider that this Earth is the one place able to supporting life?

Surely it’s statistically inevitable that one thing some other place has hatched or spawned or in any other case twitched into life, zapped by lightning in some distant storm cloud of ammonia?

The Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has known as the world’s consideration to a peculiar celestial physique that was formed like a protracted, flat 400 metre cigar, and that zoomed previous us in 2017. It was first noticed by astronomers in Hawaii, and it was christened Oumuamua, which implies ‘customer from afar arriving first’ in Hawaiian.

In the view of Professor Loeb, the article was unquestionably an artefact of alien intelligence, maybe a ‘mild sail’ or vestige of an other-worldly transport system —nevertheless it scooted previous us so quick that we hardly had time to get a deal with on it.

Was it an area craft? Was it an enormous tapas platter? I’m afraid that the overwhelming scientific consensus is that Prof Loeb is mistaken, and that Oumuamua is only a comet like every other . . .

And so I would as effectively inform you now — you trustworthy ufologists who’ve made it thus far on this article — that there isn’t any proof in any respect that’s available to the British authorities to counsel that alien life types have ever existed. That doesn’t imply, after all, that they don’t exist. Perhaps the nice tapas platter will do a U-turn and are available again to land amongst us, and all the nice mysteries can be solved directly.

Perhaps Oumuamua will return bearing kidnapped racehorse Shergar and Lord Lucan and Amelia Earhart — regaling one another with the lacking WhatsApps from Penny Mordaunt’s telephone. But one way or the other I do not assume so.

Which leads us to a stupefying reflection. Even although there are 200 billion trillion different stars, in addition to our yellowy little solar, and due to this fact 200 billion trillion different potential photo voltaic techniques, there is just one planet that has truly produced life, and we’re on it now.

With yearly that passes, wherein Prof Loeb and others fail to seek out any signal of anybody else on the market, that chance grows.

Every yr we ship increasingly plaintive indicators to the heavens — determined bat-squeaks to clarify our existence — and the silence grows ever longer and extra profound.

It is the actual fact of that singularity that’s certainly way more mind-­boggling than the choice; as a result of if aliens don’t exist, then you need to ask your self, why us, why right here, why now?

Is this complete factor a fluke, or is there in reality some divine plan — some supernatural afflatus* that breathed life into this lump of rock and no different?

Well, I’ve been via the papers, and I’ve listened to one of the best and most good of our brokers — and I’m right here to inform you that they don’t have the slightest thought. On this biggest of all questions our intelligence group is completely dumb.

They don’t have any ­proof for any such supernatural phenomenon. Nor can they rule it out, any greater than they’ll rule out the existence of Santa Claus.

Happy Christmas!