The Queen’s strength was that she did not change

Her task – did she ever quite realise it? – was to preside over a country in decline; and not merely to preside over it, but to be the nation’s anaesthetic, creating the illusion that the nightmare was not happening. When she was born, at 17 Bruton Street, by Caesarean section, on 21 April 1926, Britain commanded the mightiest, richest empire in the history of the world. By the time she died, Britain had ceased even to be what Gore Vidal once called it, an American aircraft-carrier. It was simply a muddle of a place, which had lost most of its manufacturing industrial wealth, all its political influence in the world, and any sense of national identity.

You could be forgiven for believing, since the sudden death in Balmoral, that everything had gone back to the norms of 1952: the BBC fervently monarchist, the ceremonies of accession and proclamation utterly traditional, the sentiments of enthusiasm, not only for the royal family, but for all the ancient forms which they represent, heart-felt.