U
nveiling the government’s agenda for the coming year from a golden throne situated in the House of Lords, the Queen will this week deliver a short speech – prepared for her by No 10 – which will touch on Boris Johnson’s key priorities.
While no stranger to the pomp and ceremony of the event — it will be the 67th occasion on which the Queen has opened parliament since November 1952 — the monarch will find a scaled-down affair compared to previous years due to the Covid restrictions, with guests banned and social distancing measures in force.
Expect the speech itself to be littered with rhetoric on the government’s “levelling up” agenda and how the prime minister, buoyed by the local election results in England and the Conservatives’ victory at the Hartlepool by-election, intends to spread opportunities across Britain.
