Rob Blackhurst

There's always been something compelling about Princess Anne. It is the combination of shocking rudeness – especially to the public when they are proffering gifts, the time-warp fashions and seventies bouffant, and the below-stairs new husband who now seems to be entirely hidden away.

I once met a Royal Correspondent from a News Agency whose job was to traipse around the country with her on her doughty, dogged list of mind-numbing engagements, and apparently she blanked him for years. But, then, no one can be entirely bad who invented the term "Naff Oorrff (regularly deployed at photographers) and who told a would-be kidnapper who ordered her out of her car at gunpoint "Not bloody likely".

I found myself idly watching her 60th birthday interview, which scaled comic heights of unctuousness, with a sports journalist inviting her to tell us all how she had achieved so much. It told us nothing, apart from the rather brilliant forgotten episode when Anne decided to become a professional jockey. Anyway, in counterpoint to all this was a sweet interview with Zara and Peter Phillips.

But it did tell us one important thing about class. Zara has an indifferent Estuary English accent – a little like Jodie Marsh – while Peter sounds rootlessly Middle Class. Neither of them really sounds privately educated, let alone bona fide posh. This must be the first generation in history where the grandchildren of the monarch aren't forced through a regime of elocution and deportment lessons, presumably because Anne wouldn't have much truck with that kind of stuff and nonsense.

One of the biggest changes to the British in the last forty years is our slumming down of speech patterns, the fashion for regional over RP. It's happened everywhere from the Queen downwards: who sounded like Celia Johnson in the fifties compared to now. John Humphrys is more Welsh now than he was twenty years ago; Michael Parkinson is more Yorkshire.

And, whenever I hear Paul McCartney singing Beatles songs these days, the one thing I notice is that he doesn't pronounce his Ts anymore. The phrase "Paperback Writer" is crisp in the original recording. Now it's become "Paperback Wrider". "Getting Better " has become "Getting Bedder". We've become a far more unequal society since the sixties in other ways, but our standards of speech, at least, have become much more democratic.