Note: This article is from the Guardian.

This article titled “How the royal wedding boosted the monarchy” was written by Stephen Bates, for The Guardian on Monday 26th December 2011 19.59 UTC

It must be very aggravating. Just when you have locked the royal family back in the box labelled “repressed memory”, up they pop again, more popular than ever. This year it has been the royal wedding, next year it will be the Queen’s diamond jubilee and possibly – rising excitement here – a new royal baby. It will be hard to escape them, particularly if the newspapers have anything to do with the matter.

The royal family are on a roll, if anything so undignified can be conceived. Yet just short of 10 years ago, at the time of the Queen’s golden jubilee, things were very different. There was continuing fallout from the death of Princess Diana in 1997, the rumours and conspiracy theories still unresolved. Prince Charles, glum and unmarried, was in a state of near-open warfare with the rest of the family, close to establishing a staff of rival courtiers, and royal butlers were about to go on trial accused – unjustly – of pilfering from their employers. It was the culmination of a decade of terrible publicity for the family firm. And then, on top of that, at the dawn of the year, the Queen’s sister Princess Margaret died, followed a few weeks later by the Queen Mother at the age of 101.

A decade on, many of those clouds have rolled away: the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh are still ploughing gamely on – she approaching 86, he coming up to 91 – though that may have to be reassessed in the light of the duke’s pre-Christmas medical emergency. Charles is happily married and more at ease than for decades, marital discords banished across the family. And, best of all for the future of the monarchy, there’s a young – well, youngish – prince and a beautiful bride who has risen, as Oscar Wilde might have put it, from the purple of commerce rather than the ranks of the aristocracy, albeit as the heiress to Party Pieces rather than Amazon or Google. Both William and his little brother are even in worthwhile jobs and not troubling the tabloids.

As the royals tramp round the Sandringham estate this Christmas, they will reflect on a year well spent, apart from the duke’s health scare, as will their officials and advisers back at St James’s and Buckingham palaces. Whenever a big royal event is planned there is always a frisson of anxiety that it might flop, that the streets will be empty or, worse, filled with morose or abusive subjects in the sort of fearful scenario that the Arab spring has illustrated all too clearly.

Instead, the wedding last April brought more than a million spectators into London with many millions more watching on television around the world, while republicans could muster only a couple of hundred diehards for their own street party a mile away.

When the young couple visited Canada and the US a couple of months later, the excitement was such that three-quarters of a million of God’s frozen people thronged the streets of Ottawa to catch a glimpse while a week later Hollywood’s finest turned out in force to attend a banquet with Wills’n'Kate in Los Angeles. Reassuringly, the young couple seem refreshingly unstuffy and approachable, direct and able to engage in conversation without being too stilted or patronising, unlike some other members of the family.

That’s all good for the future, but there’s been a spring in the Queen’s step recently too. It’s very noticeable that she has gone all smiley on royal visits. The old dour, glum expression, so often seen a decade ago, has been replaced with a slightly surprised delight that people still want to turn out to see her. That was particularly marked on her state visit to Ireland in May, the first royal trip to the south in 100 years and one fraught with historical resonances, which turned into an unalloyed triumph.

Even more so in Australia of all places in October, where again cheering crowds were out in force, as if stunned that a diminutive octogenarian grandmother, however sprightly, should come so far and perhaps moved by the fact that she might not pass that way again.

Perhaps there will be a tide of republicanism when she dies, but that could still be some way off – her mother lived to 101 – and the royals are certainly mounting a doughty rearguard action if so. Meanwhile, there will be next year’s diamond jubilee hoopla over the first weekend in June, followed closely by the Olympics to attend.

Her Majesty may be slowing down – only one or two events a day now, separated by lie-downs in the afternoons – but she will still dutifully be doing a royal tour of the British Isles during the summer and the younger members of the family are being sent out to show themselves across most parts of the Commonwealth.

When the organisers advertised for 1,000 assorted boats to accompany the Queen by taking part in a flotilla down the Thames on 3 June, they were 10 times over-subscribed. A million people are confidently expected to line the river banks between Putney and Tower Bridge to watch the show go past. It may be bread and circuses, but the masses seem to like it.

None of this quite disguises the fact that this will probably be the last great celebration of the current reign. Impossible to believe that the Queen would undertake such occasions in another 10 years and there there is no disguising the fact that the royal family is ageing, its longevity a tribute to sturdiness and a miracle of modern medicine.

The Queen is already the oldest British monarch and in another three-and-a-half years, will become the longest reigning one as well – no one now under the age of 70 can really remember living under another head of state. Whenever he succeeds to the throne, Charles will be an elderly king. And Prince William, the family’s great hope to continue the fairytale, will be 30 this summer. They do need to keep the magic going. Time for that royal baby …

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