’TIS the season to be merry. Says who? David Cameron, that’s who. If not exactly merry, at least happy.

He has earmarked £2 million and embarked on a quasi-messianic national campaign to discover what constitutes happiness, presumably with the expectation of creating some – before taxing it.

Politicians can rarely be accused of missing a gifted opportunity to launch an initiative, and after months of misery, we may indeed have something to be happy about. Not only are the thoughts of the nation focusing on Christmas cheer, but there’s also a Royal Wedding in the offing.

Incidentally, how many Kate Middletons have you spotted during the past couple of weeks? I’m not talking of the opportunistic aspiring professional doubles whose physical appearance has led to their expectation of a bob or two by posing in appropriate copycat attire, or even less.

There’s hardly a glossy magazine photo-spread nowadays without its quota of slim, smart, brunette mannequins. No sooner was the engagement of the young prince and his good lady announced than ‘that’ little blue dress was being copied and began flying off the pegs of every garment shop and online clothes outlet.
While newspapers are already offering free souvenir dinner plates, the prospect of multi-million-pound happiness is already spreading far beyond our shores to the Chinese manufacturers of tasteless trinkets and fakery.

You could say that the announcement of the Royal engagement was the news we had all been waiting for. For the printed media, it presented a golden opportunity to publish the souvenir supplements they had been building up since their snappers opportunistically chanced to focus on the cheeky see-through number modelled by Her Kateship on the student catwalk of a University of St Andrews fashion show back in 2002, much to the admiration of her Prince.

For the politicians, it offered a heaven-sent foil behind which to bury bad news. A bold cynic might even suggest that the inordinate length of time the ever-patient Ms Middleton has been kept waiting has less to do with the hesitation of a shy suitor than institutional convenience to inject a ray of happiness at a time when the spirit of the nation had sunk to a low ebb of recession, belt-tightening and uncertainties over the bid for the 2018 World Cup. And for the rest of us, the chance to wrap ourselves in the flag of loyally reflected health and happiness – and the prospect of a day off work.

The mood of the nation is as important to gauge as it is difficult to fathom. But it is vital for those charged with our well-being. The catastrophic collapse of financial institutions in 2008 dealt a huge body-blow to national as well as individual confidence and morale. So as we embark on the painful climb-back, any element which can add heart to the recovery and underpin our fragility will inevitably assume a happiness quotient in spades.

It’s a tried and tested remedy. Sixty years ago another Royal Wedding was used to pierce the gloom of post-war austerity, with the prince’s grandmother radiating regeneration after the traumas of war.

But there is a health warning: happiness does come with expectations, often unrealistic and which can never be lived up to.

Institutionally, it is extremely difficult to manufacture or manipulate. And can you create happiness? Remember the holiday camps designed to provide low-cost relief and recreation to the population who had been excluded from letting their hair down on the holiday scene for lack of ‘readies’.

Social engineering, for whatever motive, can be a blunt-edged concept. Take, for instance, the sort of tinkering hinted at in the States during the marathon GST debate, when it was suggested that imposing the tax on ‘luxury’ foods might encourage poorer customers to buy more healthy staple diet choices.

And you could be forgiven for believing that the happiness gene has a hard job emerging. The media cannot resist putting the wind up the population with tales of woe – whether it’s the prospect of being overrun with immigrants, wiped out by swine flu or frozen stiff by Siberian snow. Doom and gloom sell more copy than happiness.

It might even be that we find it hard to identify happiness, or live with it for too long. Street interviews conducted by BBC News on the day the Cameron initiative spread its fairy wings identified more people preferring happiness to material wealth, with happiness calculated in terms of respect and safety.

I was reading recently of a study of life-styles across a broad range of countries. It concluded that while folk were happier as their incomes rose quickly, over time it made little real difference. So there may be crude satisfaction to be drawn from earning more than your friends, but it might not lead to real happiness.

Yet is happiness all it is cracked up to be? Doesn’t it encourage lethargy? Don’t we perform better in adversity? It’s possible that we may not be able to bear happiness for too long. Longed-for summer sunshine soon brings complaints about the heat; dreams of a white Christmas are equally short-lived.

It’s the same thing that prompts the newspapers to swoon over the upcoming Royal event, capitalise on coverage, churn out the supplements and whatever, and then take great pleasure in raking over anything to belittle the process and the participants. Maybe we just get bored.

But let’s not dwell on the negatives. It doesn’t need a brush from Ken Dodd’s tickling stick to appreciate happiness as ‘the greatest gift that we possess’. At least let’s hope a little seasonal cheer is scattered over the sets of the TV soaps this Christmas. Do have a happy one.