Well, wasn't she marvellous? Yes she was, in her way. The idea that the royal family is our "model" family is today so radically absurd that it's difficult to remember how many people used to credit it. But even if nobody would now pick Charles or Andrew for a brother, or Anne for a sister, or Our Sovereign Lady the Queen for a mother (and the analogy always used to break down before it got to the image of Philip as an ideal father) there are probably not a few citizens and subjects - even some republicans - who could have pictured the Queen Mum as a favourite granny.
Of course we now know that she wasn't all that sweet to her own daughter Margaret when the poor girl fell in love for the first and last time. And she wasn't all that tender and grandmaternal about the Spencer lass, either. But grannies often have to be tough and dynastic and these lapses were well within her job description. Still, the sentimental image of the old dear who liked a flutter on the ponies, loved her tipple, waved away her overdraft and was good for a laugh will take a while - had already taken a while - to fade. If swizzle-sticks were still being manufactured, she would probably have granted the makers a royal warrant, as she did to numberless distillers, brewers, furriers and jewellers. She would have made quite a "flapper" of the Brideshead era; that forgotten age of heavenly chocs, well-mixed cocktails, low-slung cars and (as Waugh himself put it) chauffeurs kept waiting hour upon hour without compunction.
Only to recall that era, and the Edwardian one that preceded it, is to realise how complete has been the eclipse of monarchy, and how great its attenuation even in Britain. When she was born, there were real-live Hohenzollerns, Romanoffs and Hapsburgs, all of them related to the gloomy Saxe-Coburg-Gothas and Battenbergs into whose house she was wed. And she lived to see unclean laundry run up the Buckingham Palace flagpole, while her grandchildren failed to stay married and her eldest daughter's dominions either became independent states or - even in the home islands - contemplated doing so. Quite a facer for the last Empress of India. Her unfailing cheerfulness in the face of all this was (refreshments to one side) an imperishable part of the great British traditional "act" whereby the situation is always desperate but never quite serious.
The tabloid-and-tapestry view of the matter depends, as usual, on pretending that important moments in British history never actually occurred. In other words, we will be treated to innumerable photographs of her waving from the balcony of the palace, on VE day, on the Queen's last jubilee and on her own centennial. But nobody will care to reproduce the picture of her first appearance outside those famous windows, which was the occasion of the welcome given to Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich. The prime minister's capitulation to Hitler received the royal warrant, in public, in front of cheering crowds, before he had to submit himself to the inconvenience of explaining himself to parliament. The court historian John Grigg (formerly Lord Altrincham) did not exaggerate when he described this as "the most unconstitutional act by a British sovereign in the present century". Nor was the Queen a mere hand-waving accessory to her husband in this conciliation of the Nazis. Philip Ziegler, official biographer of Edward VIII and a man with his own "access" to the Queen Mother, records that she was an enthusiastic seconder of the King's long campaign first to retain Chamberlain or, in default of that, to make the even more reactionary Lord Halifax prime minister, and at any cost to keep Churchill out of office.
In other words, if the sweet old lady had had her way, there would have been no "finest hour" for her to illumine; no opportunity of touring bombed-out East Enders and pearly queens; no victory parades or regimental colours for her to patronise. In claiming credit for the spirit of the blitz, the now-anglicised house of Windsor was flaunting the medals of a defeat. But then this is all part of the supposed "magic" of monarchy, whereby the basest of metals can supposedly be transmuted into gold.
From the coronation of appeasement to the everyday task of putting a smiling face on imperial decline is not that short a step. But if we allow Walter Bagehot's most familiar phrase on the subject of monarchy - in the devout hope that this very phrase will soon die a natural death - there has been a good deal of daylight let in on the magic, or better say the alchemy. It is no longer possible for the crown to secure feudal loyalty from the press and parliament, as was the case during the abdication crisis which made her our Queen and which kept all the funny business within the family.
Those who have "let in" the daylight have mostly themselves been courtiers or sycophants or flunkeys or (as in the case of the late Lord Wyatt of Weeford) all three. Wyatt's memoirs of his old friend showed a rather silly and sozzled Tory matron, affecting to sound "old fashioned" as she complained about the bad press given to P W Botha and Ian Smith. She was also given to making vaguely disobliging remarks about Jews, and to pursuing an interest in astrology and the paranormal. Not a terrific record for one who had had infinite leisure to rethink the automatic assumptions of the less polished element of the ruling class, and a multimillion-pound overdraft with which to finance, had she wished it, her education.
One tenuous justification offered for monarchy in old Europe was its role as patron of arts and letters. The Queen Mother made perhaps rather too much of her fondness for the writing of one of her jockeys, Sir Dick Francis. This could conceivably have been an affectation designed to demonstrate that most otiose of royal attainments - "the common touch". (If royal families insist on having that, then what in the name of heaven do we commoners need them for?) But it might also have been a genuine enthusiasm. Not even Wyatt of Weeford disputed the essential facts in A N Wilson's account of a dinner party that he, Wyatt, had given for the old girl. As the martinis and fine wines took hold, she reminisced about a poetry reading held at Windsor Castle in the old King's day, when Edith and Osbert Sitwell had been present, and also an enigmatic other:
"This rather lugubrious man in a suit, and he read a poem ... I think it was called The Desert.
"At first the girls got the giggles and then I did and then even the King ... Such a gloomy man, looked as though he worked in a bank."
Of course the author of The Waste Land did work in a bank, and was somewhat depressing, but some of us who have our quarrels with Mr Eliot might regard this episode as a poor return for his lifelong monarchism and anglophilia. And even those of us who didn't put Ted Hughes in the front rank of English poetry were appalled at the trash he turned out as laureate - entitled The Wind and the Lion - in honour of the Queen Mother. The fact must be faced: royal patronage has its share of blame for the dumbing-down of national culture, just as it does for the promotion of the creepier sort of politician, whether Tory or populist.
It's two decades and more since we learnt of the fate of the Queen Mother's nieces, Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon who, both born somewhat retarded, were first covertly immured in a mental institution and then falsely reported - via the agency of Burke's Peerage - as having died. This is the sort of practice that one associates with the court of a demented tsar, or with the more antique barbarities of Glamis Castle, the Queen Mother's birthplace. However, there is also a sense in which such callous culling is inseparable from the hereditary principle. The breeding of a "master family" is not much different in principle from the breeding of a master race; it involves much the same combination of the ridiculous and the sinister, and is every bit as incompatible with democracy and civilisation. It will not be recorded by history that the Queen Mother's progeny were exceptional except in their egotism and pettiness: not even her stoic and dutiful eldest daughter can escape some part of the blame.
The flags that now dip are also standards that have fallen. Much of the emotion of the leavetaking will be genuine (in spite of the yellow-press effort to make it seem bogus by hysterical overstatement). It will be genuine because it is a tribute to longevity confused with a tribute to history. And it will also be genuine because it is a farewell to something that is irretrievably lost - the authority of monarchy in Britain. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short for the elderly Queen and for her arrogant consort and self-pitying son. Republicans should still be modest, because this is not yet their triumph. It was the hereditary concept itself which produced a woman who symbolised and endorsed luxury and idleness in personal life, philistinism in culture, ruthlessness in eugenics and reaction in politics. The mourning will necessarily be brief: no serious people can truly regret the passing of an epoch such as that.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.