Matthew Norman: Her Maj has rarely made me happier

Has ever a nation gazed upon its sovereign and murmured "Gawd bless you, Ma'am" as reverently, or been as thankful for the calming permanence she represents in a bewilderingly fast-moving world?

The aura of paradox was overwhelming as Her Maj made her stately way from one palace to the other. Stockmarkets were diving as the terror of Euro-bankruptcy tightened its grip, the papers were full of that sensationally sinister US scientist Craig Ventner's masterplan to copyright the creation of new life forms, and over here the struggle continued to adapt to the new life form known as The Coalition.

Meanwhile Huw Edwards, gratifyingly awed by the pageantry on BBC1, prepared for the main event with a commentary presumably plagiarised wholesale from one delivered by the recently deceased Tom Fleming in 1956. "Now here's someone who has a very, very important role to play," Huw gravely intoned, as a portly chap in a garish frock stepped gingerly out of a gilded carriage. "Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Ford. He's known as the Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain's Office. In effect he looks after investitures and garden parties ..."

And the precise nature of this titan's very, very important role? Carrying the imperial crown to a room, said Huw, and setting it down on a table next to a sword. Let Dr Venter do his Bond-villain worst. So long as Lt Col Ford is on the job, we need fear nothing.

It hasn't always been easy in recent years to love Britain and her myriad oddities, as the shots of New Labour ex-ministers shambling into the Lords reminded us, but yesterday it was. O brave new world that has such people in it, you felt as Butch and Sundance stepped out of No 10, and set off side by side looking for all the world as if they were about to link arms and do a Cleggeron version of the Lambeth Walk all the way to Parliament. And O brave old world that ploughs doughtily on, in the shape of Her Maj, her consort and the charmingly imbecile anachronisms of a state occasion, unflinching and rock solid amidst the engulfing change.

If the Speech itself had lost its power to amaze after being leaked to a Sunday paper, it didn't matter a jot as she recited this unusually meaty, bill-packed document with sombre assurance. As always, you couldn't help wonder whether she was fighting the mischievous urge to improvise with something on the lines of, "My government will reduce the deficit by having the Duchess of York introduce me to her new friends in Saudi Arabia, Syria, the Lebanon and Wapping. My Government calculates that the Budget will move into surplus by August if the Duchess can inveigle the Duke of Edinburgh and I (and I know that should technically be 'me', but it's my English and I'll say what I bleedin' well want) into joining her in Dubai for the forthcoming Fighter Jets And Shoulder-Held Ground-To-Air Missile Launcher Expo."

But the air of regal inscrutability, which seemed to go walkies last year when her recitation of Gordon Brown's final programme took on a nicely judged tone of sardonic detachment, was back. If she was thrilled or horrified or entirely unbothered by the plans to reform elements of our alleged constitution, there was no way of guessing.

Many of us, I will guess, are encouraged by this programme, however familiar Lords reform, a referendum on the Alternative Vote and fixed term parliaments had become; and delighted by the prospect of the legislature treating the executive with other than sneering contempt.

It fell to Tessa Jowell, taking the BBC1 role Eve Pollard used to perform at Ladies' Day at Royal Ascot, to remind viewers how low the Commons had sunk with a lurch into savage, if unintended, satire. As the camera picked out Lord High Chancellor Kenneth Clarke, the elongated ear flaps at the side of his wig rendering him a ringer for Deputy Dawg, Tessa saw fit to dwell on his predecessor.

Jack Straw, she gushed as a camera picked out that slithery old serpent, was a great defender of the primacy of parliamentary debate, and one who "loves, stands for, believes in the House of Commons, in everything being done with proper scrutiny".

How true that is. As long ago as October, after parliament had twice scrutinised and rejected his plan to have potentially embarrassing inquests held in secret even from the deceased's family, Mr Straw tried to sneak it on to the statute book by burying it deep in a Bill, thus hoping to negate the need for any debate at all. Not for nothing should Ms Jowell, neither the thinnest or longest plank on the Labour benches, be known as Tess of the d'urrrhhh!bervilles.

Much as with newly dormant piles, it was almost worth having her gang throbbing away in power for the relief of having them there no more. Happiness, to the professional depressive, is seldom more than the absence of pain, but the sections of the Speech dealing with constitutional reform were a positive pleasure.

The damage Labour inflicted on the legislature's role in checking the executive was horrendous. If the proposal of that 55 per cent super-majority required for a dissolution has damaged Mr Cameron's reformist credibility a little, by hinting at the autocratic centralist instincts of which we were richly sated long ago, there was enough in this speech to sustain the suspension of disbelief a while longer.

Strange days these are indeed, and stranger they may yet become. Needlessly reminding us of the fiscal chamber of horrors in which we find ourselves trapped, Her Maj did nothing to dull optimism that, thanks to the opportunistic adroitness of Messrs Cameron and Clegg, Britain is beginning to emerge from the somnambulistic nightmare in which a priest in a Santa suit was turned away from the gates of Yarl's Wood on a mission to deliver presents to tiny African children banged up within, and a new-born baby was welcomed by the state for the chance to get freshly hatched DNA on the database with future criminality in mind.

During yesterday's build-up, Huw Edwards sounded especially awestruck by the great age of that ceremonial sword laid next to the Crown (there won't be enough smelling salts in the realm if he ever meets a dinosaur fossil), first used in 1685 at the coronation of James II. On the off-chance that the Queen Sky-plussed the show for later viewing, it would have been indelicate of him to point out how that reign ended a few years later.

It would also have been irrelevant because Her Majesty, resplendent at 84 and genetically programmed to last another 15 years at least, is going nowhere. Whether she is about to preside over another glorious revolution it is, of course, far too soon to know. But this is palpably a gentler, more humane and civilised country than a month ago, and even those of us who'd refuse to put a cross next to a Tory name with the butt of an AK-47 pressed to a temple will have relished this Queen's Speech above any in memory.