The sober mourning that confounds republican hopes

I once felt ashamed to be British. It was a couple of days after the death of the Princess of Wales, and St James's Park was full of people who seemed to have lost their wits. Faces distorted by hysteria, they were shambling about snivelling, blubbering and moaning, often clasping flowers, like savages with their fetishes. The hearts of oak seemed to have turned to hearts of mush – and worse. It would have taken little to transform lamentation into anger, and to incite the crowd against the gates of Buckingham Palace. On that sunny day, in the heart of Imperial London, there was all the moral degradation of the mob in Julius Caesar.

A Jewish friend who had a similar experience told me later that he had almost felt able to sympathise with the Frenchmen who welcomed Vichy in 1940. He had suddenly understood how it was possible to give way to such despair over the collapse of national morale as to believe that the only hope lay in the purgation of dictatorial rule.

Fortunately, the pessimism was overdone. The cult of Diana, Princess of Wales, died with her. Four-and-a-half years later – to my surprise – not one sighting of her ghost has been reported. If her death inflamed the worst elements of crowd psychosis, the passing of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother has shown her people at their best. In St James's Park on Friday, everything was very British, very civilised. Admittedly, few people were wearing dark suits and black ties; most were in the casual outfits with which the British try to urge on the approach of summer. At first glance, it looked as if a mass picnic was taking place.

But it was a thoughtful, even solemn, picnic. People had turned up in large numbers, at some inconvenience, to pay their respects. So they still are, in the long queues patiently waiting to process through Westminster Hall. So they will be tomorrow when millions will watch the funeral on television. People may not feel the need to dress up themselves, but on great national occasions, they still expect pageantry and magnificence. That is part of being British.

Republicans' hopes and monarchists' fears have been confounded. The monarchy is still interwoven with the soul of this country and the jubilee will be a great success. It probably would have been anyway, but now that the Queen has lost her mother and her sister, a surge of public sympathy will turn ceremonial into triumph.

We monarchists have a problem in expounding our beliefs. The utilitarian arguments for a monarchy are that it encourages tourism and saves us from having to choose a retired politician as president. To a monarchist, however, those are irrelevancies: rather like saying that people should believe in God because flower-arranging and brass-polishing gives old ladies something to do.

Monarchy is like religion. Both depend on faith, which is not susceptible to argument; both express themselves in grandeur, which should be a joyous experience, but also a humbling one. In each case, the ceremonies ought to remind the faithful of the transience of individual life, by putting its little excitements in a long context.

In the case of monarchy, this is a purely historical context, and that has political implications. Monarchy may be above politics; this does not mean that monarchists are. The instincts which make a man a monarchist or a republican are an important part of those basic temperamental predispositions which also determine political allegiance. It is hard to see how any Conservative could fail to be a monarchist; it is equally hard to see how any monarchist could avoid being drawn to conservatism, whatever his views on the Conservative Party.

A monarchist will be inclined to believe that habits and customs have not grown old without acquiring merit; that the benefits of so-called progress are always fewer than its advocates would have us believe, while the unintended consequences are always more significant, and frequently deleterious. A monarchist will insist that when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change. A monarchist will not be deterred by allegations that he is prejudiced; what leftists call prejudice, he regards as a valuable legacy of inherited wisdom. He will also argue that many of his pre-judices have been reinforced by post-judice.

Above all, a monarchist will love his country. With Lord Melbourne, he will believe that to be born British is to have a most favourable draw in the lottery of life, and will be grateful accordingly. This does not mean that he will disparage other peoples' patriotism. A monarchist will maintain that a quiet pride in one's country is a basic human right which all nations should enjoy (even if they are not able to do so with quite as much justification as the British).

This is irreconcilable with any serious left-wing belief. Even in its watered-down, intellectually neutered contemporary form, leftism is an enlightenment project. These days, lefties' aspirations are muted, but they still hanker after the era when they believed in reshaping human nature. By instinct, they are still convinced that the glories of the human condition lie in the future. By temperament, if not in electoral politics, they will still be inclined to sacrifice the present for the future.

Monarchists and Tories profoundly disagree. Give them a semi-detached in Surbiton any day, rather than a palace in Utopia. Not that they have anything against the future. On the contrary: they would draw attention to the glorious successes of British history, whichwerepossible because we were able to draw on the strength of the old to assist with the challenges of the new. Underneath the ancient rituals, this was also the country of the Industrial Revolution.

Tory monarchists would also point to the successes of British political history, in which there was a constant dialectic between old form and new content: between an ancient constitution and radical innovation. As a result we were able to survive for centuries with only the most minimal of written constitutions. With the exception of the US, those nations with written constitutions have discovered that being on paper, they were easy to tear up. Until the Blair Government started charging around like toddlers in a china cupboard, rushing into legislation on complex questions which had not been remotely thought through, we British were more fortunate. But the spirit of the British Constitution cannot be found in the law books. It was expressed on Friday by the young Princes, marching behind the gun carriage which carried their great-grandmother's coffin.

Which is not to say that no problems lie ahead; Dianamania is too recent a scar to encourage monarchical complacency. But this is not the moment for problems. Instead we should salute the life and works of a great lady whose obsequies take place tomorrow. Eighty years ago, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon hesitated before committing herself to a royal life. We should all be thankful that she took the right decision, and thus embarked on a life of duty, service, loyalty, glory and Britishness. May her example inspire, and endure.