Queen's Diamond Jubilee: How the monarchy got its mojo back

Once Upon a Time – well, in 2011, actually – a book called Knit Your Own Royal Wedding sold lots of copies. It had a beautiful bride (Catherine), a tender groom (William), a corgi, an archbishop, and a royal family in hats. What the book couldn’t do was knit the hysterical response to the wedding; you cannot form the way the British feel about monarchy into anything as solid as wool. It is more like a shared folk-memory, or dreams.
I could call it joy, but that is wrong; pride is wrong too. The best word, I think, is excitement – and the Diamond Jubilee will be the same; Oxford Street is full of bunting and, in the window at Selfridges, there is a giant fibreglass corgi. Could we have imagined this in 1997, the year Diana, Princess of Wales died? Who would have thought the monarchy could shake off the crisis and renew itself?
It clearly has. Britain looks toward the jubilee with happy eyes. People queued all night to see Elizabeth, the last Queen-Empress, lie in state in Westminster Hall in 2002, and the Mall was full for the Golden Jubilee that same summer. The Diamond Jubilee weekend will be as electric. Republicans will fret, looking for evidence of anti-monarchism in the polls and find an unhelpful 18 per cent for a republic. The British, in their wonky way, will make their vows to monarchy again; 84 per cent think there will be a monarchy in a decade.
So the British are mad for monarchy. We don’t even ask ourselves why; that is how mad we are, and why most royal reporting sounds so insane – either Mills & Boon delivered on your knees, or anecdotes so inconsequential, but so weighted with mystical significance, you wonder if the teller is relating an encounter with a fairy, or, in some cases, a troll.
There are many theories as to why monarchism endures, while republicanism bores. One is that it comforts us, as Britain declines from an empire to a funny shaped island in the north where people do not know how to drink. British pomp, we fancy, makes rival heads of state look rather desperate, despite their more fashionable clothes and smaller noses; and it is no coincidence that the wheel of monarchical taste is stuck at Georgian bling.