Richard Heller: After 60 years of dedication, the Queen deserves a proper Diamond Jubilee celebration

But even the most passionate republican can feel ashamed that the Government is contributing just 1m to its celebration. That values the Queen's service at less than 17,000 a year – a miserable return for 60 years of devoted duty as a constitutional head of state.

Sixty years doggedly reading of state papers, 60 years opening Parliaments and reciting bromides and bombast from her governments without betraying a flicker of emotion.

Sixty years of state visits and small talk at functions, 60 years of unveilings, openings, launchings, and foundation stones, 60 years promoting British business and exports, 60 years supporting Britain's forces and a raft of good causes, 60 years honouring people who have served the nation.

The Queen deserves a bigger thank-you, and apart from any personal tribute to her the Diamond Jubilee celebrations should also encourage the British people to take stock of 60 years of rapid and giant change in their national life.

A mere million? As Queen Victoria might have said, this will never do. By comparison, the Government last year managed to spend 84m on stationery. The previous government shelled out over 600m in National Lottery money to celebrate the Millennium – an event which meant nothing to Britain and should have been left to Christians.

The Jubilee will be competing for attention in 2012 with a minor sports festival costing over 9bn. Is beach volleyball nine thousand times more valuable than our Queen and our history?

To match its niggardliness with money, the Government is giving the Jubilee little attention and energy and has made virtually no effort to engage the British people and ask how they would like to celebrate it.

The responsible Government department is Culture, Media and Sport (which has been a lightweight, ragbag department since its inception).

It is hard to find the Jubilee section on the DCMS website and even harder to discover which of their ministers is in charge. As a public service I can reveal that it is John Penrose MP. He has to fit any Jubilee work into a duty roster which includes tourism, heritage issues, the National Lottery, the licensing laws and gambling. Any one of these things could keep a minister working overtime, and the Jubilee file is always likely to fall to the bottom of his in-tray or even behind his desk.

Given the dismal record of Peter Mandelson in charge of the Millennium Dome (who will forget his unkept promise of "Surfball, the sport of the 21st century"?) it might seem a good idea to keep national celebrations far away from ministers. But in hard times like these, they do need a high-profile minister to fight for money and public support.

Most depressingly, the Department seems uninterested in obtaining any ideas from the general public for Jubilee celebrations.

There is no invitation to this effect on its website, and none are published there to stimulate any public response. If you do send an idea, it will elicit no follow-up or even acknowledgement. To be fair, the Government is asking children, through Blue Peter, to design a Jubilee logo. But adults with ideas for the Jubilee might just as well spare their breath.

Here are several worthwhile submissions from people I know, which are now languishing in DCMS. I know that readers of this newspaper, renowned for their creativity, will come up with many more and I hope that they will bombard that Mr Penrose with them (and copy them to their MP).

A musical acquaintance has come up with the enchanting idea of the Jubilee Chord. At a given moment in the Jubilee celebrations, when Big Ben strikes the hour, singers and musicians across the nation would deliver a giant sustained chord of E natural (the matching note) before seguing into the National Anthem.

A historian suggests the preparation of an oral history of life in 1952, with a matching exhibition where visitors could return briefly to the world of the Grove Family and Dixon of Dock Green.

They would pay for things there in pre-decimal money – money with character and history as part of its value, which inspired mathematical skill in everyday life. "A schoolboy has threepence-halfpenny in his pocket. If he buys two gobstoppers at three farthings apiece, can he also afford a penny liquorice string and the penny halfpenny for the bus ride home?"

A radical proposes that the Queen should auction a diamond from her private collection, where it would fetch a fabulous sum in aid of Jubilee charities.

Still another idea is for the Queen to make a Royal Progress in Jubilee Year through all the counties – and ridings – of her realms. I think that this might well happen in some form.

But who could blame her if, instead of returning to the pointless pinchpennies in her Government, she chose to remain with her loyal and generous subjects in Yorkshire?

Richard Heller is a former policy adviser to Denis Healey. His new cricket-themed novel, The Network, has just been published.