Queen to make rare address to nation amid coronavirus crisis

Pre-recorded message will be broadcast on Sunday evening, says Buckingham Palace

The Queen is to address the nation on Sunday evening to deliver a message about the coronavirus crisis, Buckingham Palace has announced.

Expectation has been growing about when the head of state would make a public statement about the unprecedented events that have seen the country go into lockdown to combat the Covid-19 pandemic.

The monarch has already recorded a special broadcast on the outbreak from Windsor Castle, where she and her husband Prince Philip have been since 19 March.

“Her Majesty The Queen has recorded a special broadcast to the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth in relation to the coronavirus outbreak,” Buckingham Palace said in a statement.

“The televised address will be broadcast at 8pm on Sunday 5th April, 2020. The address was recorded at Windsor Castle.”

The Queen’s televised address to the nation will be only the fourth of her 68-year-reign during times of national crisis and grief.

Amid celebratory times, the Queen made a televised address to mark her Diamond Jubilee in 2012. While she broadcasts a recorded message each year on Christmas Day, special addresses from the monarch in troubled periods are rare.

There have been three previous speeches broadcast – after the Queen Mother’s death in 2002, ahead of Diana, Princess of Wales’s funeral in 1997 and about the First Gulf War in 1991.

Her Majesty held her weekly audience with the prime minister today by telephone last week, speaking to Boris Johnson from Windsor Castle.

Earlier on Friday the Prince of Wales opened the temporary hospital facility at the ExCel centre in east London via a video-link from Scotland and praised its speed of construction as an “almost unbelievable feat of work”.

He hailed the new NHS Nightingale hospital as a “practical message of hope” for coronavirus patients during a “time of national suffering”.

Charles, who this week completed a period of self-isolation after contracting coronavirus, added: “It is without doubt a spectacular and almost unbelievable feat of work in every sense – from its speed of construction as we’ve heard to its size and the skills of those who have created it.

“An example, if ever one was needed, of how the impossible can be made possible and how we can achieve the unthinkable through human will and ingenuity.”