The BBC wheeled out various "constitutional experts" to fill the gaps in the celebrations. Simon Schama was to the fore, and showed that he has finally turned from a serious historian into a courtier in the Malvolio mould, who dealt with the politicisation of the monarchy by ignoring it. I never trust an intellectual who appeals to anti-intellectualism, the better to get down with the kids, and found everything about Schama's performance phoney. 

"Well, y'know there's a lot of really solemn talk from on high about learning to be British again and what a national community is that sounds boringly like a professorial seminar," the professor gushed. Having dismissed the professorial seminars, which provide him with his living, he gave one. "That's what it actually means," he continued, gesticulating to the crowds outside Westminster Abbey. "It's the instinctive outpouring of millions of people. Royal weddings used to be about power. That's why they weren't actually here but were locked away in Windsor Castle. It was basically mergers and acquisitions. Not now. Now it's really all about the next generation making something very old very fresh for the future."

Maybe you think I am being too hard on the royal family and Schama. And in truth, the refusal to take what looked like the politicisation of the ruling house seriously would have been a forgivable omission, if it had been an isolated incident.

Unfortunately, it is not. When people say the British respect the monarchy, what they mean is the British respect the Queen. Apart from one moment in the 1980s when she made her disapproval of Margaret Thatcher public, she has stayed out of politics. Charles III — and how hard it will be to spit out that title — has made it as clear as he can that he will use the throne as a bully pulpit. When Vanity Fair talked to him last year, he said he would rule "in a different way" from his predecessors, "because the situation has changed". He said his parents should not have sent him to schools where they taught pupils to take the initiative if they did not want him to speak out. "So it's their bad luck, but that's the way I intend to continue."