When will the public see through the illusion of the monarchy?

My alienation stems from more than my lifelong republicanism. I am not anyone’s “subject” far less that of Charles Windsor. I abhor the hereditary principle as debasing, ridiculous and outright anti-democratic. But these are intellectual arguments. Something else is making me feel alienated.

It is simply that I hate being manipulated – politically or emotionally, and certainly I detest both together. And I feel we are currently in the thrall of a great manipulation. That does not for one second lessen the emotional or political impact. People’s feelings towards Elizabeth Windsor are real, sincere and heartfelt. I am not poking fun. But my rational self is appalled.

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The modern monarchy is a purely political construct. How could it be otherwise? It does not stand above the state, it is an expression of the state – as exemplified by the endless repetition of the shot of the six living former prime ministers at the accession ceremony for Charles III.

In fact, the modern monarchy has been recrafted several times, in order to keep pace with state priorities. The picture of continuity and national unity portrayed in every mention of the life of Elizabeth Windsor is make believe.

The modern, bourgeois monarchy is a product of the 19th century and the fertile imaginations of two great thinkers, the English journalist and editor of the Economist, Walter Bagehot, and our own Walter Scott, inventor of the historical novel.

Both were quintessentially modern men who wanted to re-invent a constitutional monarchy as an ideological bulwark against the mob of unruly proletarians that capitalism now relied on, instead of the previous unruly peasantry. The problem with the proletarians was their unreasonable desire to own the means of production and run things themselves.

For Bagehot, an early and conscious eugenicist, the ordinary people were too ignorant to be left in control. But they were also indispensable in their mass for running the show. Enter a revived, redefined monarchy as a grand public relations exercise that reconciles the popular masses with their betters, leaving the latter in control.

Under Queen Victoria, the monarchy would keep its unifying mystique through ceremony and pageantry – most of it newly minted. But the monarch would now live a new, ideal middle-class life that was more accessible and understandable to the population, engendering loyalty and common feelings.

A balancing act yes, but one Queen Vic pulled off superbly.

Bagehot’s ideas were widely disseminated in his book The English Constitution, published in 1867, the same year as Marx’s Das Kapital. No prizes for spotting the reference to England. But Bagehot, influential constitutionally as he was, suffered from being too intellectual.

It took Walter Scott’s imagination and flamboyance to add the new royal glitz. Famously, in three weeks flat, Scott invented and produced the pageant for the royal visit to Edinburgh of King George IV, reviving tartan dress in the process. Everything you see on your telly screens follows from that.

The problem was that individuals got in the way of Bagehot’s plan for a middle-class yet still glamorous monarchy. This is a difficult act to pull off. You need a hereditary monarch who is the equivalent of a Hollywood movie star – familiar enough to be an exemplar yet still gorgeous enough to provoke adulation.

Unfortunately, Victoria’s son and heir, the rotund Edward VII, was a spendthrift sexaholic. He was absolutely the wrong monarch for an early 20th-century Britain wracked by industrial unrest, the imminent Irish breakaway, and militant Suffragettes. Enter, in 1910, George V, the true embodiment of the middle-class monarch.

George V is made out to have been boring, but it was a studiously cultivated self-image.

He was famous for collecting stamps, amassing the world’s most valuable collection. How can you stage a social revolt against a stamp collector?

But in private, George was anything but boring. He had tattoos and loved inviting black American jazz musicians to private parties at the palace. During the First World War, George deftly changed the family name, dropping the German Battenberg for an English Windsor.

But the roulette wheel of an hereditary system turned up zero again in the following generation, when George’s son Edward VIII abruptly abdicated to marry a divorced American gold-digger. Just as well, perhaps, given Edward’s subsequent pro-Nazi sympathies. Edward as a Quisling monarch and Buck House flying the swastika would not have been a pretty sight. But if you gamble your constitutional rights on who gets born to whom, “them’s the breaks” as Boris would say.

Of course, after Edward’s brother George VI, we got Elizabeth Windsor, the perfect (if accidental) embodiment of Bagehot’s dream middle-class monarch.

But behind her was Philip Mountbatten, a refugee from the bit of Victoria’s far-flung clan that was foisted (unwisely and inexplicably) on Greece and then booted out.

Phil was determined to stay put this time and can be seen as a key driver in fulfilling Bagehot’s plan for a monarchy that looks familiar enough to be acceptable but still retains enough mystery to keep us all docile (and in the political dark). It was Phil who insisted on televising the coronation in 1953, when hardly anybody had a set.

Few folk understand Elizabeth Windsor’s central contribution to British politics – providing the ideological cover for the end of empire. When she came to the throne, Britain still had a colonial empire held down by bloody force in places such as Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus.

Elizabeth and Philip were famously at the Treetops safari lodge in Kenya when she received news of her father’s death. Somehow the episode of Netflix’s The Crown covering this moment fails to mention that the visit was a premediated attempt to convince the world that Kenya was at peace.

Actually, the anti-colonial Land and Freedom Movement (aka Mau Mau) were already in revolt. A few months after the royal visit, Kenyan revolutionaries burned Treetops to the ground. The Brits would eventually kill 90,000 Mau Mau insurgents in revenge.

Charles Windsor and I are the same age. I’ve met him on a number of occasions. His mother provided a national – if wholly contrived – sense of continuity and comfort during the post-war era. An era in which the Brits were expelled from their empire, snuck in and out of Europe, and now find themselves foundering economically.

I think the outpouring of grief and emotion this week is a reflection of Britain’s – certainly England’s – national malaise. People are mourning a loss of their political comfort blanket. It was, after all, the week the pound sank to its lowest level in decades.

Charles Windsor means well. I think, on what we know, that he is of a liberal bent. But he is an accidental monarch in accident-prone times. After the public pageantry of his accession, his reign will be defined by economic crisis and a new international instability.

What if the people wake up and realise that the substance of the monarchy is a grand illusion and always has been? What happens then?