Minette Martin ( Sunday Telegraph)

Fortunately I did not see the Prime Minister’s Royal Walkabout at Westminster on television last Thursday. It was quite bad enough looking at the photographs of it in the newspapers on Friday. A few feet behind the Queen, perhaps not more than a yard, Tony Blair was pacing about smirking and gesticulating, pressing the people’s flesh and luxuriating in the roar of the people’s applause, for all the world as if he were the King himself, or at least the Heir Apparent. At this moment of triumph for the Queen, the wretched man appeared to be in every shot, accepting the glory for himself, or at least sharing it.

It is true that Blair was accompanying the Queen from the Abbey to the banquet of which he was the host, and therefore had some excuse for being close to her, if only walking unobtrusively behind her; he had no excuse, however, for going to the crowd barriers and stretching out both hands in the people, catching their fingers and dazzling them with the people’s manic smile. Worse still, his wife did the same on the other side of the road, very much as if the credit for this historic occasion and the people’s approval were theirs. Three cheers for King Tony and Queen Cherie. None of this might matter very much, if it were just a question of the Blairs behaving in a very vulgar and tactless way, unable to control the symptoms of their vanity and ambition even on someone else’s big day, after all if the Queen can put up with it surely the rest of us can. Besides, it is so preposterous as to be funny; one of the greatest entertainments, for those who try to see life as a comedy of manners, is when the wrong person thinks he is the guest of honour.

Unfortunately it is not so simple. For one thing Tony Blair is subtly turning himself into the new guest of honour at the expense of the old. He may say that he wishes to cherish and support the royal family, but it seems to me that the advantage goes the other way. His support both diminishes them, and hugely increases his own standing. He has with dazzling originality managed to use the House of Windsor as the warm-up act for his own more ambitious performance. This began with Diana, Princess of Wales’s funeral, everything he did for the House of Windsor did far more for him, and subtly made them incapable of carrying on without his understanding guidance.

There may be something in that. There are things he knows instinctively that they didn’t, and that they now need to know in order to survive in the People’s Republic of Cool Britannia. But how clear it is that Tony has told them – clear from both the Queen’s and the Duke of Edinburgh’s speeches on their golden anniversary, and clear, I think from his own rather condescending tribute to them. And how contrived, after all his advice, every single one of their gestures will seem, whether spontaneous or not.

Much worse than any of this, was the way in which Blair managed to exploit the Royal connection and the glamour of last week’s celebrations, to draw a veil over the worst disaster of his reign so far – the Bernie Ecclestone donations. All that glad-handing and flesh-pressing, all that public confirmation of him as the people’s uncrowned Prince of hearts and all that theft of the Queen’s thunder, enabled him to get away with it right royally. Can the people really be played upon as easily as he thinks? The People’s Premier inspires depressing thoughts about democracy.