It was raining in Suffolk during the silver jubilee weekend 35 years ago and I was on a cycling holiday with teenage friends. We didn’t know or care much about the monarchy, so we were taken utterly by surprise by the joyful seriousness with which every little hamlet we passed was marking the Queen’s time on the throne. Small villages had bunting stretched between thatched houses and flags in the gardens. In larger villages the narrow, wet pavements were lined with people enthusiastically waving Union Jacks from underneath their umbrellas and waiting for the little processions of decorated floats to pass through.
We paused on our bikes to watch, certain we were witnessing one of the last moments when British people would come together in this spirit of innocent reverence to celebrate royalty.
Their enthusiasm, which wouldn’t have been out of place in the 15th century, was surely not going to survive the 20th. We four already considered ourselves to be well-read, well-travelled metropolitan sophisticates, and it was obvious that as the world changed and people led more interesting and unpredictable lives, their attachment to this archaic, frumpy institution would disappear.
How silly we were and how little we understood the human yearning for symbolism, familiarity and cohesion. The monarchy has had bad years. It has looked temporarily ridiculous, as when it took part in It’s a Knockout on television, and it has looked dangerously remote and even cruel, as it did briefly after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. It seemed too rich and privileged in the recession of the early 1990s, when Windsor Castle experienced a fire, and taxpayers saw no reason why they should pay for the repairs.
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In every case the monarchy has seen the danger of unpopularity and proved intelligently responsive. It has reacted to public scorn by making rapid changes whether to its mourning rituals, its broadcast appearances or its willingness to cut its budgets and start paying tax.
Its success is evident in the opinion polls. Ipsos Mori’s surveys show that over the past 25 years support for a republic has never gone higher than 22%. Today the royals have reached new heights of popularity. The vast majority of the population support them and few would prefer to live in a republic.
The democratic alternatives to a monarch as head of state are not particularly appealing. Every nation needs rituals to bind it together and a figurehead to lead it. A president would probably come from the pool of successful politicians. They are by their nature partisan. The stronger and more single-minded they are, the more they alienate their opponents.
We can imagine that the best of qualities are embodied in her small, stern frame There’s no question about the rage and resentment that would be engendered in some parts of the electorate by a President Thatcher or Blair. If front-rank politicians proved too divisive to be elected, we would fall back on lower-achieving, second-order figures — an Alan Johnson, a Paddy Ashdown, a Theresa May.
No one who came from elected office and who had endured the years of scrutiny that we put such figures through could match two of the great advantages that royalty retains: considerable mystique and a largely anodyne, inoffensive public presence.
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The Queen has never given an interview. Because we know only what she chooses to tell us in carefully crafted speeches, we cannot glimpse her prejudices or weaknesses and we can imagine that the best of qualities are embodied in her small, stern frame.
It’s true that Charles doesn’t have quite the same opaque quality. He couldn’t have been expected to spend 60 years leading his own life while never venturing a single contentious opinion. Yet his passions for homeopathy, architecture, gardens and charity work don’t irk many Britons, and the indignation caused by his long affair with Camilla is fading. The more dutiful and less egocentric he has appeared, the more the public has liked him.
It is, however, the monarchy’s great weakness — its unearned, inherited privilege — that may have become its greatest strength. Over the past few years most of Britain’s institutions, whether banks, churches, press, police or politicians, have had their flaws mercilessly exposed. We have seen how often individuals fib and cheat and fight unfairly because they want money or status or public affirmation. We can’t trust the people working for these organisations as we once did because we’ve glimpsed how desperate they are to do well for themselves.
Hereditary monarchs don’t have to engage with any of that. They have already arrived, without effort. Their predecessors may have usurped thrones, confiscated land and killed their rivals, but the contemporary constitutional monarchy just benefits peacefully from ancient misdeeds. They never need to fake an expense, break a bank, bribe a policeman, struggle for social advantage or lie to a constituent. That makes them appear positively virtuous. It adds to the sense of otherness that is such a powerful part of their appeal.
Ben Page, chief executive of Ipsos Mori, says the secret of the monarchy’s renewed popularity is that it symbolises so many different things for different people. It offers nostalgia, authority, permanence, Britishness, greatness and unity. It is our most easily understood connection to our past, threading us back through stories of reigning and warring families to a coronation ceremony that dates back to the 7th century and was derived from that of the Merovingian kings.
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I think it is a smaller sliver of history that will have so many of us dancing at street parties or on river boats this weekend. I thought years ago a fast-changing world would make the Queen and her heirs an irrelevance. It has done the opposite. The more fragile the framework of our lives becomes, with careers, industries, marriages and currencies all liable to collapse at short notice, the more reassuring it is to have a familiar figure with a handbag and a bright coat at the centre of our national existence.
It’s the sheer continuity of it that is so compelling — the idea that, whatever else goes wrong, a dutiful royal will still be climbing out of cars to shake hands, wave, cut ribbons and ask us whether we’ve come far today.
The Suffolk villages will be hanging out the bunting for many decades yet.
Minette Marrin is away