How the press lost the common touch

It was, said a front-page headline in The Observer, "the week we all grew up". This theme was warmly endorsed by The Sun - and when The Sun and The Observer agree on anything we should perhaps pay some attention. "The country

Is that really what readers have been served in all those acres of newsprint since 30 March? The abuse of the BBC about Peter Sissons and his burgundy tie? The early reports, led by The Guardian ("the paper that got it so badly wrong", according to the Daily Mail), that the nation would decline to honour a pampered centenarian (" Uncertain farewell", "Mourning will be brief")? The Mirror's frontpage apology, which now looks so ridiculous: "Sorry, Ma'am - sorry that so many of us are showing you such little respect"?

The lack of respect, it soon turned out, came from the newspapers rather than their readers, who poured out from their homes all over Middle England in what the Mail described as a "river of love". As The Sunday Times put it, "the queues say it all", wrongfooting predictions that "her passing would be marked by a mass outbreak of apathy". John Casey wrote in the Mail: "Just when royal-weary media pundits thought it safe to paddle in republican waters, the nation's farewell to the Queen Mother has made them retreat abashed to the shore."

Not all of them, however. Mary Riddell wrote in The Observer: "Ten days of coffin-shifting represent the last extravagance of a woman whose Rabelaisian appetite for Dubonnet and taxpayers' money was exceeded only by the surfeit of mourning she demanded." Even on the morning of the funeral, The Guardian's Decca Aitkenhead attributed the massive display of public support to a day out in the sun for tourists and somewhere for parents to take their kids in the school holidays - plus, of course, capitalist newspaper-owners boosting their sales: "Media fibs created those queues for the Queen Mother's coffin." Euan Ferguson in The Observer summed it up as "the week in which the press finally lost touch with the common people". For once, it seemed, "it was the Firm what got it right, exuberantly so", the Royal Family showing themselves, on this occasion at least, to be more closely attuned than most editors to the fact that, as Andrew Sullivan put it in The Sunday Times: "The Royals serve two fundamental and sometimes conflicting social needs: the need for celebrity and the need for continuity."

The press coverage of the Queen Mother's death turned out, in fact, to be a game of two halves as news desks, confused at first about what their readers really think about the Royals, eventually caught up with the sudden outpouring of public feeling - not so much of grief or emotion or even royalism, but of national pride and a sense of being a part of history - tinged with affection and respect for someone they recognised as a fellow human being and felt they had known all their lives, who had never wavered from the old values and had come to symbolise the country's fortunes throughout the 20th century.

As Sullivan said: "Mourning her is not really about her: it's about us." The Mirror, making a strong recovery from its earlier misreading of the public mood, said much the same: "This wasn't about being just a fan of the monarchy. It was about being a fan of Britain."

Libby Purves concluded in The Times: "Somewhere between the republicans' sour- hearted nihilism and the yucky royal obsessives there lies a modest, inarticulate awareness that there is emotional power in monarchy, and that, by and large, the present lot use it well." That view was supported by a frontpage poll in The Independent (a paper that once prided itself on never mentioning the Royals) that the proportion of people in favour of scrapping the monarchy has fallen in a year from 34 to 12 per cent.

Garland's cartoon in The Daily Telegraph yesterday, echoing the Saatchi poster of the Thatcher years, proclaimed: "The Monarchy is Working." Even The Mirror conceded in a front-page message that probably reflects the learning curve that many papers have gone through recently: "Thanks Ma'am and Goodbye. Your death, and the extraordinary events of the last nine days, have reminded us why the monarchy might just matter after all."