It is the happy fate of the British royal family to live on long past the announcements of its inevitable demise. Were this institution to have died each time its obituary had been written, I’d be sending this from a republic many times over. One of the sharpest in a long line of such eulogists, Tom Nairn confidently pronounced in 1997, on the eve of Tony Blair’s victory in the general election that May, that “all that the Crown now accomplishes is to counterpoint and somehow exaggerate an ambient unreality: the new, motherless country left behind by its moral decease.” If only. A few months later, the death of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed in Paris was to unleash a wave of public mourning that, rather than stoke the flames of republicanism, gave the monarchy a new, and modern, lease on life.

Now, once again, the death of a leading royal has opened Pandora’s box. The death on April 9 at the age of ninety-nine of Prince Philip, the Queen’s husband of seventy-three years, has, if the nation’s press is to be believed, brought the country into mourning. His passing was met with blanket coverage on British TV and in the nation’s supine press, with the schedules for both of BBC’s main channels, as well as for the independent ITV, cleared on the evening of his death and replaced with rolling coverage; the BBC showing the same two-hour tribute on repeat on both of its terrestrial channels. Nor were we spared by the nation’s newspapers, which featured such overwrought displays of grief as the fourteen-page commemorative supplement from the Times as well as gushing articles from nearly the full range of identikit columnists.

While such heartfelt laments for this (apparently) most modern of princes were appearing, the public response was unexpected. The BBC’s wall-to-wall coverage swiftly became the most complained about moment in British television history, with the Beeb receiving over a hundred thousand letters of protest to its endless public memorial. Earlier this week, I walked the few miles into central London to see the expected scenes of mourning outside Buckingham Palace. What greeted me on the Mall was nothing like the vast sea of flowers left at Kensington Palace after the death of Princess Diana. The only sign that something amiss was a handful of cheap floral tributes resting on some iron railings. If this is a grief-stricken nation, someone should tell it.