Diamond Jubilee: The still centre APART from the rain, nothing went wrong. Four days of impeccably organised celebrations for the queen's Diamond Jubilee left the British feeling grumpy about their weather but pleased with their monarchy. Fifteen years ago, things were rather different. When Princess Diana died and the queen failed to be seen to mourn properly, she seemed out of touch and out of time. Republicanism was in the air. Since then a number of factors have given the monarchy a boost. When the world is full of uncertainty, an institution that has stood the test of centuries has a certain appeal. When politicians have been caught fiddling their expenses, a head of state who is above politics looks rather attractive. The troubles of the monarchy's enemies may also have helped. Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, the royals" principal tormentors in the media, have themselves been under attack for hacking celebrities" phones and other crimes. They have laid off the royals of late, possibly on the grounds that harassing them would go down badly with the readers when the monarchy is so much more popular than journalists are. But the main change has been in the management of the monarchy. There has been an increasingly tight focus on the royals who matter - the queen and her successors - while peripheral and occasionally embarrassing family members have been airbrushed out of the picture. At the end of the Jubilee celebrations, the queen was accompanied on the balcony at Buckingham Palace only by the first, second and third in line to the throne (Charles, William and Harry) and a couple of wives, rather than the usual massed ranks of hangers-on. The royals have also fallen back on their core competences: saying nothing and upholding tradition. According to Andrew Marr, the queen's best recent biographer, she understands that she is a symbol, and that symbols are "better off mostly keeping quiet." Her son has failed to grasp this, and sounds off on architecture, GM crops, alternative medicine and suchlike. Her grandsons, by contrast - advised by a few canny ex-soldiers and a former ambassador to Washington, Sir David Manning - stick to the royal knitting: serving in the armed forces, doing good to the poor and waving to crowds. Finally, in the Duchess of Cambridge the royals have made a good new hire. They have evidently learned from the disaster of Diana, a neurotic, untested girl who had no particular desire to be queen. Kate Middleton, by contrast, dated Prince William for years and thus had her character thoroughly checked out. She proved her discretion during a temporary separation and her determination by holding out for him. The couple look thoroughly dependable and dull - just like Queen Victoria and her Albert, founders of the modern bourgeois model of monarchy. Yet any institution's fate depends on the boss and, at 86, the queen will not be in the job for long. As Prince Charles will do well to remember, the monarchy's stock can go down as well as up.