Not the Queen's cup of tea as Kylie opens Games with a pop

My taxi driver, fortuitously, lived just behind the City of Manchester Stadium, and as we cut through the back streets to circumvent the road blocks set up for the opening ceremony he spoke lugubriously about the mixed blessings of the Commonwealth Games.

"They've spent £500m on all the facilities," he said. "Think what kind of a hospital you could build for that. The swimming pool is one of the better things – a lot of local people and students will use it. But the velodrome is a white elephant.

"There are some new flats being built down the road from us, but they're going for £80,000. That's way out of the range of any local kids. Round here, anyone who's got a job is a celeb." What about the stadium, I wondered. At least that wouldn't be a white elephant with Manchester City moving into it after the Games? There was a pause, and I saw him looking hard at me in his mirror. "I'm a Super Red," he said.

At least that guaranteed him some interest in the ceremony which followed given the climactic involvement of Manchester United and England's iconic midfielder David Beckham. The cheer which greeted Beckham's emergence on the track is the largest he is ever likely to get on Manchester City's ground. And the naturally affectionate way in which he accompanied the terminally ill six-year-old Kirsty Howard as she returned the Queen's Baton to its owner after its 63,000 miles Commonwealth relay was one of the more heartwarming aspects of the evening.

In contrast the Queen, all in green, appeared to do little to acknowledge the painfully obvious efforts of a little girl who required to be connected even at this heady moment to an oxygen cylinder which was wheeled along behind her. A ceremony spokesman pointed out afterwards that the Queen had broken with protocol to step down from her seat to take the baton and insisted that she was "as overwhelmed as everyone by the whole event".

It was only one moment in an evening which contained innumerable small causes for celebration. But you had the same sense of something vital lacking as in the days after Princess Diana died when the Royal Family failed to give any outward sign of grief or to connect with a nation that was, for a few alarming days, overwrought.

Had it been Princess Diana receiving that baton, she would almost certainly have crouched down alongside the frail figure in front of her and put an arm around her. She would, in short, have been warm – just as Beckham was. But the Royal Family, sadly for them and us, don't do warmth.

As the sleek black car bearing the Royal Standard moved away from the stadium, past knots of cheering folk who had not been able to get in to see the ceremony but had waited up with their kids to hear the reverberating music and watch the fireworks exploding over the rim of the stadium, there was another glimpse of a waving hand for the people to remember. Seen the Queen, the Queen in green.

As with her ill-judged Buckingham Palace pop concert – let's get in touch with Youth! Call Sir Paul! – the Queen was made to sit through large parts of Thursday night listening to something which, definitively, wasn't her scene.

What is a 76-year-old monarch to do when Kylie Minogue sings Spinning Around – "I know you're feeling it cos' I like it like that"? How is the head of the Commonwealth supposed to react to If You Need Me by Shaboom or Breathe by Blaze feat. Philip Bailey? There is only one dignified course of action possible in the face of such relentless evidence that you are of an older generation. Do little. Thankfully as the cameras roved around the VIP stand the wide screens did not show that most painful of sights – oldies tapping their programmes and swaying along to Young Peoples' Music.

The other mitigating factor in the Queen's appearance was that she was not bearing any kind of promotional material. No swoosh, stripe or logo adorned the brim of her hat, nor the sides of her sensible shoes. She could have been a free agent.

Unfortunately, the same could not be said of Beckham, whose Elvis-style tracksuit, baggy white with gold sequins, spelled out the name of his sponsor on his chest and reinforced the message with three stripes down his arms. Presumably the boy Beckham had no choice in the matter – let's hope so – but how tawdry was that?