The healthy reaction to the death of a great-grandmother of 100 or so from her family is one of resignation, even quiet relief. She's had a good innings - her three-score years and 10 and then another score and 10. No one wants her to die, but it is entirely human not to be disabled by grief at her passing when her survival would have brought only decline and suffering. If you have similar feelings after the death of the Queen Mother - a woman 99.9 per cent of the country cannot count as a relative or friend - I advise you to keep them to yourself. Her stay in hospital last week revealed to those who work in the 'newzak' business that professional mourners are primed to howl with anguish and to howl down anyone who can't counterfeit pain. A gruesome media underworld starts to rumble whenever there's a royal health scare. BBC executives check if the afflicted is on the 'A-list' consisting of the Queen Mother, Queen, Prince Charles and Prince William, or the 'B-list' of Princess Anne, Prince Andrew, Edward Wessex and an unfortunate Duke of Edinburgh, who was relegated by the corporation last year - presumably for scoring too many own goals. Death in the premier league guarantees that scheduled programmes are replaced with funereal music before days of commemorative documentaries and moist news reports begin. B-list royals get second-rate tributes.  All broadcasters and newspapers, meanwhile, receive holding obituaries, stories and even leading articles from the Press Association news agency. Last week's flood of anticipatory copy included a suggested editorial for dunderheaded journalists unable to compose one themselves. ('The nation will mourn with gratitude the life of and service of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, "Queen Mum" to millions throughout the world.')  We learned from a separate piece you may read one day in your morning or evening paper or hear parroted on Radio 4 that as her body lies in state at Westminster Hall, 'vast crowds are expected to queue to file past the coffin. It will be placed high on a purple-draped catafalque on the same spot where King George VI lay in state in February 1952, and will be guarded round-the-clock by a contingent of Gentleman at Arms and Yeomen of the Guard. The ancient hall is an incomparable setting for the public's tribute to the royal lady they have loved and respected_' and so on at a length which might make the most ardent monarchist tear off his culottes.  The assumption that the nation will mourn runs through all the mainstream media's pre-cooked packages. And if a handful of perverse dissenters don't wail, they will be after them just as they were after anyone who failed to exhibit the required trauma after the death of Diana Spencer.  The shape of things of come could be    glimpsed in the  News of the World last year when it shrieked at Camelot executives for 'hatching a tasteless plot to protect their Saturday draw if the Queen Mum should die that day'. Their decision to go ahead with the lottery draw and announce the results in the small hours when the grieving bulletins were over for the night was the 'the ultimate in bad taste'.  If the nation was grieving, everyone would be too distracted to buy a lottery ticket and Camelot could take the week off. Its emergency planning to please the punters shows that Camelot at least knows that national mourning is not what it was.  The great vulgarity of monarchy is its transformation of private life into propaganda. Births, weddings and funerals are used to build customer loyalty to 'The Firm'. Throughout the disasters of the 1990s, courtiers and royalist commentators consoled themselves with the thought that the death of the Queen Mother would pull indifferent or hostile subjects back into line behind her less than perfect family. Extravagant designs for her funeral have been knocking around Whitehall and the media for years in a classified document entitled 'Operation Lion'. Its authors envisage nine days of mourning culminating in the biggest state funeral since Winston Churchill's in 1965. The monarchy would define the nation again and dominate its emotions.  Anthony Holden, the critical royal biographer, wonders whether Buckingham Palace still has the nerve to implement 'Operation Lion'. 'People will be making comparisons all the time with the numbers Diana's funeral attracted,' he told me. 'Suppose the majority paying their respect are elderly and there's scarcely a young face in sight. Suppose viewers revolt about television being disrupted for nine days. It could be embarrassing.'  Indeed it could. Politicians and advertisers are being forced to realise that millions of disillusioned consumers are blanking out their messages. The court and the courtier press should have learned by now that the old levers no longer work. The evidence for boredom with royal marketing has been accumulating for years.  The great exception everyone quotes is the death of the ex-Princess of Wales. I wouldn't deny it provoked mass inanity which compelled anyone who believed in the rationality of public life to grab   the nearest whisky bottle. But the scale of 'the grief' during those freaky days was exaggerated at the time and has been mythologised since.  The day before her funeral the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police said he would need almost all his 27,000 officers to control an expected crowd of six million. Two million turned up. A year later on the anniversary of the Paris smash, tribute programmes got abysmal ratings and the failure of public hug fests to attract anything resembling a crowd, or even a huddle, forced the BBC to decide 'most seem to have decided to do their mourning in private'.  This was too lame, even for the BBC. Its managers drew a realistic conclusion. They decided not enough viewers wanted to see the pageant for the Queen Mother's one-hundredth birthday and became the object one of the  Daily    Mail 's hate campaigns. ITV took over, and the BBC grovelled and admitted it was wrong. The week's brutal viewing figures showed the error was on ITV's side. Its Queen Mother special was a lamentable twenty-fifth in the ratings, behind  Charlie's Garden Army and a repeat of  It'll Be Alright on the Night (VIII) .  We reported last week that senior courtiers feared that next year's Golden Jubilee celebrations for Elizabeth II may be met by 'a wave of apathy' which could damage the monarchy, so they know something is wrong. What they don't appear to understand is why they're being swamped.  A small part of the explanation lies in distaste for the airbrushing of monarchy. Everything I've heard about the television obituaries, and everything I've seen in the Press Association files, suggests that the old line will be recycled that Queen Mother is above politics; have the skill 'to be wholly non-political in the present reign', as the  Telegraph said last week.  They must know this is drivel and she has the standard prejudices of an aristocrat of her generation. Woodrow Wyatt recorded in his diary of March 1986 the Queen Mother telling him that when the royal family are alone together they 'often drink a toast at the end of dinner to Mrs Thatcher. She adores Mrs Thatcher.'  She also adored P.W. Botha when he was President of South Africa, and thought the media and black Commonwealth was being beastly about the apartheid regime he managed. She was opposed to women priests, had suspicions of the French, a paradoxical hatred of the Germans and 'reservations' about Jews.  When she was Queen, she and George VI broke every constitutional propriety in their eagerness to support Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler and oppose Winston Churchill. So great was their complicity that the Public Records Office refuses to release the papers covering the royal fondness for appeasing the Right in the Thirties until after the Queen Mother's death. They would cause 'substantial distress', apparently.  Perhaps they would, but in the long term greater and deserved distress is caused to the Windsors' reputation by the sycophancy and evasions of their supporters and the bullying of the millions who see no reason to share their stage-managed pain.