Just over a year since the last jamboree and we’re at it again. Four days of flummery with the BBC leading the cheers. How any Tory can seriously suggest that the BBC has a left wing bias is beyond me.

It was a bit like the brouhaha surrounding Princess Diana’s death and funeral. We were being told what we ought to be feeling and no (or little) objection was being brooked. I think I saw only one interview with an anti-monarchist over the entire weekend. I’m sure the many who care little for the monarchy must have felt left out of the national discourse in the past few days.

I saw a bit of the Jubilee Concert on Monday night. Car-crash listening. Almost every artist I heard was way past their best; and the singing was excruciating. It was amusing when the orchestra struck up the second verse of the National Anthem. I could imagine the panic. “What are the words!!??” Still, the assembled entertainers were spared any embarrassment, only general crowd shots were broadcast. Faces saved all round there.

I’m pretty sure much of this enthusiasm is not so much for monarchy per se as for the person of the Queen, who has the sense to be bland and inoffensive.

Takes the mind off the economic crisis though, eh?

But what is the UK coming to? It turns out many of the stewards at the river pageant were unemployed people bussed in from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth, given no pay and told to sleep under a bridge.

Appalling.

Well, we may not have had much bread but today we had the circus.

I was glad of the day off but I can’t say I feel any better for it. The next few years are going to be rough economically. The Government has done the exact opposite of what was required to ameliorate the recession.

Still, nothing like a bit of pageantry to distract the plebs, eh?

I wish the couple concerned nothing but well for themselves but the advantages they have will (bar the revolution, and perhaps even in that remote likelihood) ensure they want for nothing. The bride in particular seems to be much more in tune with her new husband than her groom’s mother ever was. In the bits that I saw there was a perceptible warmth between them; a warmth entirely absent from Charles and Diana’s relationship. Their marriage might have a better chance of long term success as a result.

Diana was a lamb to the slaughter; a sacrifice to (some of) the British public’s appetite for figureheads and royal babies to bill and coo over. Her tragedy – if it was a tragedy – was that she didn’t realise it, at least not until it was way too late, and then she didn’t accept that noblesse oblige.

The purpose of a royal consort is to provide an heir – and spare. Once Diana had done that she became an adjunct, decoration, window dressing. Her personality couldn’t cope with that nor that Charles had never been interested in her beyond his dynastic responsibilities: before their marriage they had met very few times.

She did however carve out for herself a niche as an object of glamour, a celebrity.

I don’t think the new Duchess of Cambridge (and Countess of Strathearn) is as innocent, and there is no doubt that she has had a “normal” courtship with her husband. Ten years is enough to get to know anybody.

Doubtless the dynastically necessary babies will be along soon enough.