Long to reign over us – that old incantation has worked, so next week the Queen’s reign becomes the longest ever. She overtakes Victoria, who kept going for 63 years, seven months and two days. That’s all they need do – stay alive, procreate and do nothing to upset the multitudes.

She is past-mistress of nothingness. A dutiful enigma, say her flatterers, or a conveniently empty vessel into which Helen Mirren can imagine any amount of knowingness and intelligence. Another avalanche of adulation is about to asphyxiate us; with glossy supplements on “The Greatest Reign”, exhibitions in royal palaces selling souvenir albums, and Douglas Hurd’s gushing biography, Elizabeth II: The Steadfast. Steadfast or hanging on until grim death? Charles is now the oldest ever Prince of Wales. If the Queen lives as long as her mother, he’ll be 79 when/if he accedes. His lugubrious presence at Queen Beatrix’s abdication in 2013 couldn’t but suggest a certain longing, the same year Belgium’s King Albert stood down for his son. Is steadfastly denying her son so admirable, when other parents remortgage and raid pensions to help their children on their way? But then, “they” are not at all like us.

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Though we mark eras by their comings and goings, “Elizabethan” hasn’t caught on as an architectural, moral or social signifier. Regency, Victorian and Edwardian have resonance, but trying to crystallise her decades into an epoch will cause furious debate. At her coronation, they tried to make her the symbol of TV-age modernity, a pretty young mother in excelsis in Westminster Abbey, heralding what Winston Churchill promised would be “an immense and undreamed of prosperity, with culture and leisure even more widely spread”. Living standards did soar, though by less than our competitors and far less fairly spread.

By then, the great Labour government of 1945 had collapsed back into the hands of aged cold-warrior Churchill. Yet optimistic not dystopian futurology was the fashion, with scientists predicting we’d be living in space by now. My older sister had the improving Young Elizabethan magazine, with earnest articles on Edmund Hillary climbing Mount Everest.

Elizabethan will mean whatever you want: certainly vanishing empire and influence, her colonies and dependencies now no more than an archipelago of tax havens. She has reigned over nearly twice as many Conservative years as Labour. Whatever social progress that marks her era came mainly from those Labour punctuations – abolition of capital punishment, Race Relations Act, abortion and homosexual law reform, equal pay and sex discrimination acts, civil partnerships, minimum wage, Sure Start, devolution, human rights, nursery education, a vast expansion of universities and more. Above all, Labour’s late 1970s brought the most equal distribution of income ever recorded.

The history of our monarchs is so embedded in us by Shakespeare that his plays add depth to the absurdity of monarchy

But Margaret Thatcher caused the greater change in political culture, along with 1980s sky-rocketing inequality. Her start on uprooting the 1945 welfare state is now being carried further than she ever dared, as David Cameron and George Osborne shrink the UK government to smaller than the US state. By 2020, if their plan holds, public spending will be at it its lowest, just 35.2% of GDP, compared with Germany, say, at 44%. Thatcher’s dictum that you will always spend the pound in your pocket better than the state will has entered the DNA of British politics, where tax is always a “burden” and never the good-value price we pay for civilisation. By the Queen’s death, we are set to have the weakest and smallest government in the EU, with less social provision, less scope for national collective endeavour. We may also be out of the EU and, if so, Scotland will be gone too, the Queen’s realm diminished physically, morally, socially and culturally from those Young Elizabethan ideals.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The magic of royal unattainability was nowhere more crushingly displayed than in that faultless image of the Duchess of Cambridge, lettuce-leaf thin.’ Photograph: Nicolas Asfouri/AP

That’s hardly the Queen’s fault: she is rumoured to be a Macmillan One-Nation patrician Tory, with some notion of noblesse oblige, especially in social housing. But the institution of monarchy is deeply ingrained in the British psyche as a conservatism that tolerates the intolerable – the corrupt payola House of Lords, our archaic constitution and our crude voting system that defies people’s choice of a party reflecting their beliefs.

Maybe Shakespeare is partly to blame. The history of our monarchs is so profoundly embedded in us by our greatest writer that his plays on the rise and fall of kings elevates them in our minds, adding cultural depth and meaning to the absurdity of monarchy.

What an irony that the royal family itself seems devoid of cultural enthusiasm, preferring polo, corgis and shooting. But then, if centuries of privileged breeding and education produce dunderheads and philistines, that proves talent is genetically random, not inherited. A meritocracy would send the likes of Prince Andrew into the tender clutches of Iain Duncan Smith.

But royal births, weddings, divorces and deaths mark our own lives, willy-nilly, as a soap opera backdrop. I was five when taken on a dark winter morning to see George VI’s funeral cortege pass by. A family friend took me, certainly not my leftwing parents, who laughed at me for pleading for coronation decorations like the neighbours’ bunting. I yearned for my friend’s miniature gold coronation coach.

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That’s how shimmering royalty grips and warps the imagination, with Disney-dressed little princesses everywhere, Princess on Board signs in car back-windows. The magic of royal unattainability was nowhere more crushingly displayed than in that faultless image of the Duchess of Cambridge, lettuce-leaf thin, sleekly white-clad pushing her Silver Cross pram. A role model? Babies are universally lovely, but that picture must be the despair of exhausted mothers, leaking breasts, struggling sleeplessly to keep a newborn safe from a fractiously jealous toddler. That’s before thinking about comparisons with 3.5 million children living below the poverty line. Or the political cant about social mobility, or the new £1m inheritance tax threshold.

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That’s majesty, making everyone else feel lesser. Good grief, even Alex Salmond signs a letter to Charles with “I have the honour to be, Sir, Your Royal Highness’s most humble and obedient servant”. Feudal imagery taints everything: Christianity (and other faiths) set subjects on their knees to worship a lord and king, as if absolute monarchy were the only imaginable symbol for transcendental awe.

Put an end to this royal infantalising of a nation. Imagine how abolishing the monarchy would open all the dusty constitutional cupboards to the sunlight of reform. Let her reign as long as she lives – but let her be Elizabeth the Last.

• This article was amended on 3 September 2015. An earlier version referred to Prince Charles as the oldest ever heir to the throne, rather than the oldest Prince of Wales.

