Her Majesty keeps her mystery as jubilee celebrations draw to close

There was no husband's arm to lean on, and the loneliness of an 86-year-old was the enduring image in a day of ceremonial

guardian.co.uk, Marina Hyde, Tuesday 5 June 2012

Missing one's husband: the Queen, Prince William, the Duchess of
 Cambridge and Prince Harry on the balcony of Buckingham Palace on
Tuesday. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Pearl swords, state landaus, equine moustache wax, a white wand of office – the jubilee props list reads like a use-it-or-lose-it inventory of arcane kit which dwarfs the contents of that warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. We're only a couple of dragon's eggs short of a landmark television drama series. Odd, then, that the enduring image of the day is of an 86-year-old woman having to get through it all without being able to lean on her husband's arm. The essential loneliness of the Queen's role was movingly evinced.

Perhaps this is just projection, to use the sort of shrinkspeak mercifully not in popular currency in 1952. Her Majesty's house is not just like our house, whatever the lighting effects during Madness's jubilee concert turn seemed designed to imply. Yet wandering through the crowds on the Mall on Tuesday, you almost literally couldn't move for people worrying about Her Maj worrying about Prince Philip, insisting on finding common ground with a woman whose life is so singularly uncommon, on seeing the ordinariness in a figure who by definition must be extraordinarily other. Part of the queenly paradox is that her subjects are conditioned to see the personal in a woman conditioned not to admit of it.

Ever the professional, Elizabeth II got to the end of the day with her mystery intact – no mean feat considering she awoke to a media offering featuring the Sun blithely discussing "flow of wee" and speculating as to the size of Prince's Philip's prostate. Cystitis experts were everywhere. At time of writing it was impossible to know whether the Duke of Edinburgh would call into Channel 4's helpfully timed urinary special on Embarrassing Bodies night, but hopefully the Queen's evening statement of thanks led the headlines in either eventuality.

The morning kicked off with crowds packing the area outside St Paul's that until relatively recently was home to the Occupy protest. Yet with the exception of the small group of Republic protesters – and even the most ardent anti-monarchist might feel that people obscuring children's views of the action with wit-free placards should probably naff orf – Tuesday's denizens of Paternoster Square were madly happy to be part of the 99.9999999% who aren't the sovereign. Perhaps it's because the unavoidable lesson of the past few years has been that there are rather more troubling unelected elites than that represented by a constitutional monarch, whose near-unplayable hand requires a skewing of the Spiderman creed: with great responsibility comes absolutely no power. Really, nothing throws a monarchy into more sympathetic relief than a service on the doorstep of a financial elite whose tax-dodging and serf-loathing is a thousand times more corrosive than anything Brenda could possibly have effected had she even fancied it.

Thereafter, it was a slower-than-giddy whirl of livery lunches, state carriages and more renditions of God Save the Queen than England's underperformance in the next six decades of football tournaments could ever guarantee. In fact, to those of us who usually only hear the national anthem in stadiums, it came almost as a surprise to remember that its fourth line isn't actually "No surrender".

The goal celebration on which David Cameron felt unworthy of piggybacking has yet to be found, so it was no surprise to find the PM leaping into the gap between the carriage procession and the balcony appearance to grant an interview in which he yet again wheeled out the fact that he camped on the Mall for Charles and Di's wedding in 1981, before saluting all those who slept out in Battersea park at the weekend to get spots for the river pageant.

No mention of the unpaid jobseekers forced to doss down under London bridge that same night before being told to steward the event, but one expects that. It was left to Prince Charles – a man who famously has a butler apply the toothpaste to his toothbrush – to make what felt like the jubilee's only mention of austerity.

"But we've come here to forget all that!" insisted a woman who'd camped in St James's park. "This is the one thing we're still the best at – you don't want to think too hard about it." Especially if you're the broadcasters, whose jackpot is an image so sledgehammer in its perceived import that you might as well just caption it "NONE MORE BRITISH". It was game over when the BBC bagged a woman using a union flag as a hijab.

Of course, the diamond jubilee is one of those occasions in British broadcasting where it is de rigueur to try desperately not to tell the truth. And when no one can say "The Queen's barge looks like a Chinese restaurant" or "Why are we watching people have lunch?", you will get presenters running into difficulties – even if they aren't Fearne Cotton. The late Elizabethan age is one in which it has been deemed we simply won't be able to comprehend the significance of any occasion unless celebrities – specifically Joan Collins, Katherine Jenkins, John Barrowman, Russell Watson, Ronnie Corbett, Emma Bunton and that one off Holby – explain it to us. The omens for the Olympics aren't the brightest. (Still, ITV were struck down with a nasty case of David Starkey and may well have to be kept under observation for a few days.)

Rather disappointingly, given Britain's fabled irreverence, it was left to America's Jon Stewart to deliver a take best paraphrased as "Will you please take a look at yourselves?". Perhaps we could leave it a good week before people start accusing the BBC of Marxism again. For the crowds, it seemed, this was just as it should be. "I literally feel like Her Majesty's the grandmother I've never met," explained a man outside St Paul's. But could he envisage ever feeling the same for Prince Charles? A sharp intake of breath. "Ooh! No comment."