Are republicans becoming an endangered species?

How disappointing. Come Jubilee time and the Guardian can usually be relied upon to lead the way in publishing sour pieces moaning about ‘jingoism’, attacking the extravagance of a royal procession and trying to claim that the people who turn up to watch and join in with the celebrations are somehow outnumbered by people who would rather get rid of the royal family and live under a republic.

At the time of the Queen’s Golden jubilee in 2002, Mary Riddell wrote of a ‘family that knows how to command a deference out of kilter with its popularity’, adding that ‘a third of the population wants a republic, a third couldn’t care what befalls the monarchy, but damp-palmed curtseyers abound.’ Jubilee celebrations, she asserted, were ‘bogus and temporary’. For the Diamond Jubilee in 2012 Polly Toynbee upped the rhetoric further, writing that ‘the louder the bells, the more gaping the grand vacuity.