ONCE upon a time, in a far-off country, a Princess climbed up to sleep in a tree, beneath which wild animals prowled throughout the night.
The next morning she emerged from its branches as a Queen.
It sounds like a fairytale – as it should, since, like all fairy tales, it is true. GK Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, pointed out that: "Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense." He expressed similar sentiments in Tremendous Trifles, where he argued that the irrational position is to insist that something in a fairy tale could never have happened, when it is modern, materialist ideologies that actually exemplify the unnatural and the far-fetched.
So it is in the example above. The once upon a time can be dated precisely, and the far-off country (and for that matter the tree) placed exactly. It was 60 years ago this morning that Princess Elizabeth, during a visit to Kenya, was given the news that her father George VI had died in his sleep, and she descended from Treetops guest house having acceded to a throne.
The kind of people who don't like this kind of story are, for all their protestations of pragmatism, the ones who are ignoring the real world for the realm of romantic fantasy. They think that because something is rare, it cannot be real, or rational. Yet royalty is both those things; as real as real tennis, and as rational as a bishop's vestment.
It is an error to think that because something is uncommon, it thereby offends against common sense. Nature is full of uncommon things, of marvels, of extravagant show and elaborate ritual, as any natural history documentary will make clear to the dullest soul. To reflect that in our national traditions is the natural thing.
The practical observation is that for 60 years we have had a monarch who transcends politics, is almost universally acknowledged to have been scrupulously impartial and fair-minded, and who is remarkably popular amongst her subjects. Opposition to the monarchy, meanwhile, is based on the notion that the institution is elitist, divisive, anti-democratic and entrenches privilege at the expense of the poor. Can there be anything more obviously contradicted by empirical observation?
Those who favour a republic with an elected president might consider the practical issue that nothing would be more likely to entrench elitism, foster division, and alienate large chunks of the electorate than to replace an impartial, ritualistic, quasi-mystical, national figurehead with someone elected from the grubby ranks of the political elites.
President Sarkozy provided evidence this weekend that it's not a cheaper option, either, since it has just emerged that he keeps 121 cars in the garage beneath the Elysée Palace, and spends more than £10,000 a day on food and entertaining, all at the French taxpayers' expense. The Queen, by contrast, is a major contributor to the Exchequer through the Crown Estates, though there is no doubt of her title to those properties.
Those who call themselves materialists seem strangely incapable of registering the fact that a presidency would make no material saving. Indeed, it is more expensive, since there are the costs of periodic elections as well as the normal running of the office of a head of state, and the probability that at least some of the incumbents will be more extravagant than a monarch – though the Queen is notably frugal.
Republicans on rationalist grounds have a similar problem. What is rational about replacing an institution which, by any empirical measure, works extremely well and is organically rooted in the traditions, rituals, and sense of being a natural part of our national life? What kind of reasoning concludes that an artificial construction, based on Utopian ideologies with which many people disagree, is better than a shared national story which a large majority of the population finds natural?
This is a doctrine which calls itself pragmatic while ignoring the practical truths of human nature. It ignores the fact that most people view history as a story, and not as a manifesto, or a bar chart. It is a mentality which concludes that the legislation of Donald Dewar was more important than the imagination of Sir Walter Scott in shaping Scotland, or that statistics always trump sentiment.
As we enter the Diamond Jubilee, it's worth noticing that the statistics, both in terms of public support and in cold, hard cash and practicalities, are on the Monarchists', rather than the Republicans', side of the argument. Because the Queen has been on the throne for so long, and been so sure-footed as a sovereign, that position seems solid at the moment. It is worth remembering, however, that during the reign of Queen Victoria, the only person to have been monarch for longer, there was for a period of considerable Republican sentiment. The reason that those political pressures faded, and Victoria ended her reign an immensely popular ruler, was her ability to reconnect with her subjects' sense of what the children's history book called "Our Island Story".
Our island story is, to say the least, in the middle of a fairly exciting chapter at the moment, and it is a testament to the Queen's popularity that even the Nationalists – who harbour a number of convinced Republicans amongst the party faithful – have stressed that the monarch's position would not be affected by independence.
The principal reason for the monarchy's continued survival and popularity in our own age is that most of the country feels that it is something wound into, but also springing from, our national narrative. And while the construction of stories which reveal something true about the world is natural, attempts to impose an ideological narrative on the world feel artificial.
Some will regard this basic point of human psychology as an argument for independence, others for preserving the Union, but both sides might remember that sentiment, story, attachment and traditions are what most people regard as the practical facts of life, and that successful institutions – from nations to religions, and from families to armies – spring more naturally from them than from artificial political dogmas.
