The royal family excels is representative functions, scrupulously maintaining protocol at an official level while using small talk to help ordinary people overcome it on most of their about 2400 official functions a year. Under the Windsor dynasty, commoners even came to be invited at the royal garden parties at Buckingham palace, while ceremonies like the Order of the Garter's maintain a dignified, almost sacred air of tradition, even if that is sometimes fairly new or drastically modernized. Royal visits can play a major part in diplomacy, amicable or formal, even with hateful regimes, as well as in keeping the Commonwealth together and the Windsors on their many thrones throughout the world. Still Blair's government decommissioned the royal yacht Britannia, the monarch's preferred mode of transport.
—KGF Vissers