Prince Philip has done something unprecedented. He has denied, in the strongest possible terms, that he ever called Princess Di a trollop or a harlot in any of his letters to her. This is not very regal behaviour, entering into a media mudfight, but apparently his hands were tied - Prince William had given him an ultimatum, and we can all imagine how shattering that was ("Deny these words, or I'll never look at you shyly from beneath my bambi hair ever again!" he probably said). Clearly, this kind of nonsense shouldn't detain us for a second, whether true or not. The facts of the matter are in no doubt - the people's princess was doing the nasty with someone other than her husband for some time before their separation. Therefore, to anyone capable of using words like "trollop" and "harlot" without laughing, that makes her a trollop. It may never be known whether Prince Philip said as much to her face, but since he gets such timeless joy from saying things like "Gosh, you're very black, aren't you? How hilarious!" to the faces of black people, it seems unlikely that he curbed himself in the face of the harlot. Anyway, in a case where one person's dead and the other one's cuckoo, it doesn't matter terribly who said what; it only matters that the extant one is behaving rather unusually.  Devout royal watchers will have noticed that Philip made the news twice at the weekend - the other time, it was a brief mention of the fact that he was spotted ostentatiously leashing his Labrador while out walking, in tacit reference to Princess Anne's recent fine under the Dangerous Dogs Act. Obviously, he was making some kind of humorous statement, here: Labradors are charmless hulks of goodwill, they'd never maul anyone.  Perhaps he was saying, "You crazy members of the public, I suppose you'll want me to leash my Labrador next!", or perhaps he was saying something else altogether. But the juxtaposition of the two stories does remind us that Princess Anne's case was also unprecedented.  She isn't the first royal to own a dangerous dog, and she isn't the first to cause needless harm to her subjects by failing to do something that anyone with half a brain would have done, but she's certainly the first to be successfully prosecuted under the Dangerous Dogs Act. The Queen, normally a stickler for boring old precedent, also behaved somewhat innovatively during the trial of Paul Burrell. There's certainly no precedent in living memory for a queen to give evidence against herself in a case she really needn't have brought to court, if she'd known she was going to do that (I wonder if she can now prosecute herself for wasting her own time).  All families have to break with tradition at some point, but there is a problem when the royals do it. Not because we set higher standards for them than we do for each other, since we're all perfectly aware how only-human they are. No, it's because precedent is all they've got. Precedent is all that's standing between them and the rest of busted-flush aristocracy; more importantly, from their point of view, it's all that's standing between them and proper income tax.  It is an undisputed fact that nobody accords the royals any constitutional importance whatsoever. Of 101 Labour MPs questioned by BBC1's On the Record, 80% said the Queen should be stripped of all constitutional powers. These people are supposed to be in charge! Why don't they just put their votes where their views are? Because of convention. Why does Tony Blair waste all that time chatting to the Queen, when he has no intention of doing what she says, and she's not going to say anything anyway? Because that's how it's done. Why do we submit to being subjects rather than citizens? Because that's the way it's always been.  If you spend one minute examining their role in the context of logic, rather than tradition, you cannot see the point of them. Even the staunchest monarchists, pressed on this family's purpose, can only come up with one of two things. Either, it's a tourist attraction (which I'd contest - or, better still, offset by building another London Eye). Or, they ask, "What do we put in their place?" - well, what indeed? A freely elected president? A toothless but benign head of state? Some kittens?  It doesn't matter, so long as it's been given serious thought; so long as the final decision is reached in accordance with the principles of modern democracy; basically, so long as there is some idea behind it other than "Let's do what we did last year."  Now, I'm not necessarily advocating the overthrow of the royal family, since on this issue, more than any other, I feel profoundly indifferent. I merely suggest that they should be a lot more careful, the next time they're tempted to wade imperiously into an issue, thinking to halt our tabloid chattering with one absolute assertion or denial.  Every time they do something they've never done before, however tedious it is, they're clawing through their own safety nets. There may not be much dignity in silence, but there's always a chance we'll forget they're there.