It's fascinating, isn't it? Here we are in the middle of a national carnival of disillusionment. Bankers and journalists have been sent to join politicians and payday lenders in the lowest pit of public opinion. Today, even our schools have to answer to an education secretary who, before ascending to office, had to return to the taxpayer £7,000 of our money, much of which he had spent at a furniture shop belonging to his party leader's mother-in-law. How low can we get? And yet there remain three institutions in Great Britain which have continued to command solid levels of respect more or less since the second world war.
In the new century, core members of the business-political elite still like to vent their spite on at least two of them. The widely admired BBC and the almost universally admired NHS have admittedly been fortunate in their enemies. At the end of their recent assaults on the unassailable, it is James Murdoch and Andrew Lansley who have ended up looking both childish and diminished. Even so, of the three contemporary objects of approval, it is the House of Windsor alone which, post-Diana, comes nearest to enjoying a free pass. For all Cameron's glib infatuation with what he calls "modernisation" – a non-policy if ever there was one – there is just one act of modernisation which remains too modern for him to contemplate.
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