Cancel the Golden Jubilee now, Ma'am, while there's still time

by Jasper Gerard

It was to be a magnificent spectacle to glorify a great Queen. Then came the rows about sponsorship, resignations of key organisers and uncertainty about the star attractions. Already Her Majesty's Golden Jubilee threatens to be a flop just as monumental as Peter Mandelson's millennium extravaganza.

If there has been a contrast between preparations for the millennium and the jubilee it is that the debacle of the latter has passed without (public) tantrums. At the Dome, the mere hiring of a rumba dancer would cause a rumpus. With less than six months before the jubilee not a single town in the kingdom has agreed to buy a stitch of bunting, the London celebration is without sponsorship and until last week so much as an organiser, yet there are no squeals from Parliament or press.

Tessa Jowell, that well-known Islington monarchist who now hangs out at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport tries to talk up the great day, but you sense she would rather mastermind some gay black Irish theme night of the variety favoured by Ken Livingstone's old Greater London Council.

The Royal Family is less sanguine. There are suggestions that Prince William will be drafted in, rather as ageing rock stars drag dancing girls on stage to provide a modicum of cool. It is odd that a boy, however charming, could be made the focus of an event celebrating the past half-century despite the inconvenient fact that he wasn't born for most of it. If the Queen is not allowed to be the star or her own party it will be an indictment; not of her but of our recent history, and the elite that shaped it.

Nobody wants to celebrate Britain's past half century because there is little to celebrate, and anyone linked to that past is tainted.

Queen Elizabeth II has had to preside over our greatest national humbling since King Harold II. Even losing America seems small beer compared with the number of countries we seem to have mislaid since 1952. Our fall might not match those of Athens and Rome but it is certainly up there with the Egyptians and towers over the Ottomans. That might not have been disastrous if Britain had found a new identity, but 50 years on we are still divided emotionally over Europe and physically over the barricades of Bradford.

It would be unfair to blame the political and economic blunders - let alone historical forces - that helped to bring this about on a constitutional monarch, who has for many Britons been one of the few constant causes of national pride.

But hers is the unfortunate distinction of having been in nominal charge of the chip shop when the fat fryer went up in flames. As a relic of those testing times, she will find few who want to come out and party.

The irony is that there are finally grounds for national optimism, perhaps more so than at any time since the phoney bonhomie of Harold Macmillan. Inflation and industrial strife, the dual curse of much of Elizabeth's reign, have been beaten, while the prosperity now enjoyed by the proletariat would have seemed plutocratic in 1952. Stifling class barriers have crumbled. People are better informed and more questioning. We are well travelled and cosmopolitan (imagine the reaction in the year of the Queen's Coronation if the Foreign Secretary had declared our national dish chicken tikka masala). Who knows, we may even be nudging towards Europe.

The problem is that none of these forces works in favour of monarchy. Some, such as the decline of deference, seriously undermine it. Extreme poverty can destroy monarchy, but prosperity can erode it. Her Majesty is unlikely ever to confront an angry republican mob; but nor is she likely to enjoy again the unquestioning adoration of her Silver Jubilee.

We have become a chippy people, not easily impressed, easily bored. The Queen could ride in a finer cavalcade than Queen Victoria, and most would stay in to watch the Royle Family. Our last monarch to celebrate 50 years in the job did so as Empress of India. Our Queen will do so not even as the darling of Windsor (her home town has yet to order so much as a Twiglet for a street party).

Perhaps on the day all but the coldest class warrior will raise a glass in gratitude for a fascinating life, now almost unparalleled in its devotion to public service. But my humble advice would be to cancel the jubilee jamboree now to save embarrassment; if the Queen tries to be funky, she will be called a fraud, if she approves Spam fritter races she will be called an anachronism. Instead, save the real party for a barbecue with the family in the back garden - assuming not too many subjects are tramping through.