It's all very well bashing politicians, but who else is going to tackle transport?

Imagine if the Secretary of State for Culture laid on a free millennium concert starring the cast who performed at the Palace

God first makyth the sunne to shine on Her Majestie, and then bringeth the raine to pysse down on the politycians. On Tuesday the crowds frolicked in the Mall, and on Wednesday – the jubilee bank holiday over – drove back to work in a downpour. The Queen got the credit for the festivities, and the Government got the blame for the traffic jams – "HM The Queen 5, New Labour 1", wrote a correspondent to the Telegraph.

I predicted this royal success back at Christmas. "Expect crowds", I said. Despite my incredible prescience, however, what I didn't foresee was that the genuine appreciation of 50 years of outward restraint and service would be contrasted, not with the self-indulgent antics of the celebocracy, but with the activities of democratically elected politicians.

Laura, for example, writing in to the BBC online instant letter page, asked of the jubilee: "How many events can bring us together like that?" She went on: "A politician could never manage it. When Tony Blair appeared on the screens in the morning, he was roundly booed! This morning I am even more proud to be British than ever before. Long live the Queen!" And death to her Prime Minister!

In the London Evening Standard, Simon Jenkins, the veteran columnist and former editor of The Times, was making a similar point. In a piece entitled "Didn't we do well without politicians?" Jenkins heard a "huge sigh of relief that statehood could be celebrated on a public stage that was not also a political one".

Stars such as Paul McCartney and Cliff Richard were "not playing to the greater Glory of the Third Way project", Jenkins went on. "They were playing for Britain, without the saccharine connotation that phrase can often imply." Well, pooh to all that. The idea that a concert celebrating 50 years of a reign by a hereditary monarch is somehow unpolitical can only come from someone almost terminally complacent. And the suggestion that this particular concert was anything but saccharine will seem strange to many that watched it.

And what about the Dome, the great project of the late Major years that Jenkins, more than any other individual, pressed Tony Blair to go ahead with? Ah, you see, that was a combination of bad luck, bomb scares, the Dome being in the wrong place and – finally – the fact that, "by the end of the year the project had been hijacked by politics".

So who – on reflection – should have built the Dome, Simon? The Queen? In the back garden of Buck House? Laura didn't stick around long enough to be asked whether she would like the unbooed Royal Family once more to take over the reins of government. Tomorrow morning, for the umpteenth time, the dozen ministers who will appear on the Today programme, PM and Newsnight will be deemed insufficient because of the one whom the show asked to appear "but we were told no-one was available". I think I am right in saying that the Queen has never been interviewed. This may be exactly Jenkins's point, but it seems a bit harsh to blame that on the politicians. Can you imagine what would have happened had the Secretary of State for Culture laid on a free millennium concert in Hyde Park starring the cast who performed at the Palace? As Ian, also on the BBC website, put it, at least the same performers won't turn up at the diamond jubilee, because they'll all be dead. Amazingly, the only real criticism of this extraordinarily decorous, backward-looking affair came from The Spectator's Stephen Glover, complaining about its raciness. He must shower in his boxer shorts.

But then, only the most irreproachable monarchists were permitted to criticise the content of the jubilee celebrations. My favourite was an editorial in the Daily Telegraph, which opined that "the manufacturers of bunting, souvenirs and the like did not distinguish themselves. There was a surprising paucity of well-designed jubilee memorabilia."

Had the BBC allowed itself even the arching of an eyebrow at the wonderful naffness of much of the proceedings, there would have been hell to pay. Instead a Tim Revell for BBC News Online described the pop party as "probably the greatest night for British rock and pop since Live Aid". "As this Rock God (Queen's Brian May) stood atop the symbol of all that is solid and unmoving about British life," Revell orgasmed improbably, "he seemed to declare that the Queen was going to have a party, but on the people's terms".

Name me an elected politician who can expect treatment like this. Outside the Palace, Jennie Bond was asked by the BBC anchor where all this left the republican cause. This was outrageous. Bond is a court correspondent, not a political correspondent. It's her job to go to Klosters and hang about on the slopes, not to read the constitutional runes. "The Royal Family is cool", she told viewers. Yes, and they don't have to run transport policy in a country where everyone wants everyone else to use buses while they travel by car.

But this unflattering comparison between unelected monarchy and elected politicians was not the only occasion this week that the latter have been dumped upon. The Conservatives' own head of strategy, a chap called Dominic Cummings – a former organiser for the anti-euro lobby – described the Conservative Party as potentially the greatest threat to the pound. His pal, the No campaign director George Eustice, amplified the point, saying that he didn't want Tory MPs figuring too highly in any referendum campaign. He planned, he said, a "people's campaign", not a "political élite campaign". His cinema ads for this summer feature Harry Enfield, Vic Reeves and Jools Holland.

Mr Eustice, an unsuccessful candidate for the United Kingdom Independence Party, expresses an increasingly common view, one that The Independent's revelations about the Pam Warren e-mail at the Transport Department won't do much to assuage – that politicians as a breed are low-lives and swindlers. Better monarchs and comedians than Tories and Labour.

No. For once I am on the side of David Davis, the Conservative Party chairman. Cummings had argued that "if the Conservative Party were to define the anti-euro campaign, and articulate its message as it has in the past, then Blair has a real opportunity to win a referendum". Davis slapped him down. "Be very clear on this," he said on Wednesday, "we will be in the frontline of this battle when it comes."

And so he should be. I have never spoken to Harry Enfield concerning his views on Europe, but instinct tells me that Iain Duncan Smith's are likely to be more coherent. Not only that, but I am also more likely to be able to hear them being put to the test by Wark or Naughtie. And in the same way it seems absurd to me to contrast the popularity of a monarch on jubilee day with a PM who has divided his morning between health and nuclear war over Kashmir. So yes, of course, we'd all rather go to a party than join one – but it doesn't make us better people.

David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com