What ridiculous figures we republicans must seem on the eve of Elizabeth II’s funeral. We sound like desiccated rationalists who cannot understand that emotion, not reason, makes people identify with their country. Instead of joining in shared celebrations and mourning, we ask carping questions about the transparency of royal finances or the basic failure of our head of state and her advisers to stop Boris Johnson’s unlawful proroguing of parliament.

We think we know our history and sociology. We say we understand that nations are ‘imagined communities’, which unite strangers with common symbols and emotions. Yet when faced with the power of monarchy to hold the United Kingdom together, we complain about feudalism and our Ruritanian love of pointless display. We fail to recognise that all countries need shared myths and ours are less harmful than the myth of Russia’s holy mission to rule the Slavs or of America’s manifest destiny to lead the world. Much less harmful, now I come to think of it.

You should listen to us, nevertheless. Because republicans are always looking for weaknesses in monarchical power, we are the first to see that the royal myths that held the United Kingdom together will fail in the reign of Charles III.

Elizabeth II’s genius was to convince the British that her presence guaranteed that they were living in a benign country.  She was a reassuring figure who inhabited our dreams in a manner you could never imagine a Trump or a Putin imitating.

‘God save the Queen. The fascist regime,’ sang the Sex Pistols on the occasion of Her Majesty’s jubilee in 1977. ‘There’s no future. And England’s dreaming.’  Johnny Rotten did not realise that England needed its dreams.

As early in her reign as 1972, a study found that a third of Britons dreamed about the Queen and her family. The royal dreams of the British were comforting, far removed from the nightmares of the world. In a common scenario, the Queen would come into your home and sit at the kitchen table. She would tell you what a nice cup of tea you made, and then say, ‘You don’t know what a relief it is to talk to somebody normal and ordinary like you. I’m at my wits end about how to deal with my grandchildren, I can tell you.’

As Neal Ascherson noted, not only loyal monarchists had dreams of the Queen. ‘To their intense shame, fiercely red republicans got them, too.’

Unlike deceitful and dangerous politicians, Elizabeth II was safe. The British head of state didn’t generate anxiety but told you that at the very summit of power in the UK was a sovereign whose liking for a nice cup of tea and worries about what to do with the children were the same as yours.

What we know of her political interventions is that they were compatible with a monarch who wanted to maintain a cohesive society in which all classes of society felt that a royal sense of noblesse oblige protected them. In 1986, Margaret Thatcher’s harsh rule had brought mass misery and mass unemployment to the working-class towns and cities of the North, Scotland and Wales. The Sunday Times ran the headline that Elizabeth thought Thatcher ‘uncaring, confrontational and divisive’. Everyone involved denied the story was true, as they had to.  But in popular culture and TV dramas like The Queen, Elizabeth II was established as a monarch who cared for the suffering of the working class.

The working class of the 1980s was overwhelmingly white. The new working class of the 21st century is hugely diverse. Republicans notice that only 37 per cent of people from an ethnic minority say they support retaining the monarchy, This does not mean England is about to become a republic. But it does show that the traditional appeal of monarchy is in decline.

For much of Elizabeth’s reign England’s dreams were the dreams of the constituent nations of the UK. Scottish nationalists were well aware that any threat to remove the monarchy in an independent Scotland would bolster the unionist cause. Just as, somehow, large parts of working-class Britain regarded the Queen as ‘just like us’ so, somehow, large numbers of Scottish voters saw this English aristocrat as an honorary Scot.

Perhaps that changed when David Cameron tactlessly revealed that he had persuaded the Queen to intervene in the Scottish independence referendum of 2014. The leaders of the Scottish National party were appalled. It was as if it had never occurred to them that the Queen of the United Kingdom might want to keep the United Kingdom united. In their dreams, she sat at their kitchen tables and told them how much she yearned for Scotland to be free.

Now she has gone , Scottish public law professor Adam Tomkins says ‘There’s no doubt she was an integral part of the glue, the cement, that held the nation together. It isn’t at all obvious or self-evident that it will be replaced with anything as strong or solid.’

Today, it is far from certain that an independent Scotland would be a monarchy for long. Fewer than half of Scots say they support keeping an English sovereign.

What of her successor? To my mind Charles III’s political belief in the importance of protecting the environment has been vindicated by history, while his belief in homeopathy and mystical religion is cranky. But whatever you think of them, they are not unifying beliefs that appeal across classes and across the constituent nations of the UK.

I don’t want to overemphasise the monarch’s importance. Boris Johnson’s hard Brexit put a border in the Irish Sea. Northern Ireland voted to stay in the EU. It remains in the single market and its economy will become ever more integrated with the economy to the rest of Ireland, which is, of course, a republic. The reunification of Ireland, that once seemed as fantasy, does not seem so fantastical anymore. Scotland also voted to remain in the EU. Its nationalists now use the fact that the English forced Brexit on them as a good reason for having a second independence referendum. Meanwhile our economic failure is bound to increase divisions in every part of the UK.

For all that, loyalty to the Queen helped hold this strange country together. Most republicans will show a decent respect for her on the day of her funeral. At least some of us will reflect with sorrow that the dreams that bound her kingdom together are dying now.