"I have a quote from you a couple of days ago," says Ned Sherrin to a guest on Loose Ends, and it doesn't mean that he has encountered a thought-provoking phrase that has gone into the language during Friday, it simply means that Sherrin's large and industrious staff of researchers have found a line in an interview with the guest that may well bear reheating and re-serving, even though the guest invariably doesn't remember saying his or her "quote".Period Period furniture or period houses could, formerly, come from any period as long as it was recognisably of that period. Nowadays, "quote" simply means anything that any celebrity has said recently, interesting or not. Either way it referred to a phrase or saying or line of verse that had become so well-known it had entered the language. Here we go then.Quote There was a time when "quote" was a slangy word for "quotation" The Oxford Book of Quotes, we would say. Randy Andy?Of course paradox has always been part of the charm of the energetic man who unhappily finds himself permanently defined by a wife and son more important than himself.Philip was the foreign prince whom the old-Etonian courtiers of King George VI described as "rough, ill-tempered, uneducated and probably would be unfaithful" to the then Princess Elizabeth (interesting that for all the dirt-digging of the tabloids, and the predations of the US biographer Kitty Kelly, no evidence of his much-rumoured infidelity has ever been produced).He is the president of the World Wide Fund for Nature who shoots things and supports the legalisation of the ivory trade. Or that this week people find faintly risible the fact that his other son Andrew has been despatched to Manila for talks with President Fidel Ramos on military and economic ties between the Philippines and Britain.

Or that the Duke's son Charles is bewildered when he confesses on television to adultery and finds that the public give him no Brownie points for honesty. It is a failure of the institution of monarchy itself, with its desperate attempt to combine tradition with modernity - so that its modern image seeks to encompass pomp, concern about the environment and cavorting on distant ski slopes even in the days when the rest of us were immured in the feel-bad factor of recession.Who but a royal could be surprised that gaps open up between public and courtly perceptions, with the public complaining when no royal attended the 1989 Lockerbie memorial service or visited the devastated centre of Manchester after the 1995 IRA bomb. It is a failure of his class - none of those surrounding the royals seemed able to explain to them the distaste of the general public at the "blooding" of Prince William when he killed his first stag recently. He insisted that his kind of shooting - game shooting - was a social activity which helped to maintain a balance in the environment. He argued that there are always going to be unstable people who are going to do monstrous things but that "taking it out on the rest of the population" is not necessarily the most rational of reactions. He made the point that the members of shooting clubs are as individuals no more dangerous than members of a golf club.

The full text of his radio remarks are a sensible enough contribution to the debate on gun control which the House of Lords has chosen to extend after the Bill's swift passage through the Commons. He is the tireless worker for a vast array of charities - from playing fields for children to care for ex-servicemen - and yet he is popularly assumed to be careless of the sensitivities of individual human beings.In the end it was the cricket bat which did for him. Most people understand the arguments about the need to balance the rights of minorities with the common good. It is his inability - like that of his peers in the Lords - to grasp that for the British public the argument is over. He added: "I think these remarks are going to be counter-productive, because they will remind people that this argument is still going on and the House of Lords may well be planning to inflict defeats on the Government."It was not just the Duke of Edinburgh's inability to resist the colourful phrase and dramatic comparison which is most revealing. Robertson, whose children attended the same Dunblane school, said on the BBC 's Today programme: "The views of one elderly aristocrat, based on a completely crazy view of a comparison between a cricket bat and a rapid-fire handgun, is not going to deflect Parliament from doing what it believes to be right in the interests of public safety."But he did not restrict himself to dismissing Prince Philip as "an eccentric individual" whose comments had damaged his credibility enormously.

Tony Blair was characteristically Janus-faced: "He is entitled to his views and obviously we in the Labour Party have a different position on that," he told BBC1's Breakfast News.The shadow Scottish Secretary George Robertson put his finger on the real problem. And he warned that laws made in electioneering haste may be repented in more dispassionate leisure.However, it was the grotesque piece of imagery he conjured - of a child being beaten to death with a cricket bat - which was so singularly inapt and inept."To think of the Queen coming up here and laying a wreath at our school and then hearing her husband say something like this sickens me," responded Ann Pearston, one of the anti-gun Snowdrop Campaign organisers.The politicians, of course, have had a field-day. The subsequent release appeared to bear this out.President Alberto Fujimori is in close consultation with his most trusted ministers, attempting to find a solution to the devastating blow that Peruvian rebels have inflicted on his government's credibility.Mr Fujimori and his ministers, including the Prime Minister, Hugo Pandolfi, Minister of the Interior, General Juan Briones Davila, and Minister of Education, Domingo Palermo, were reported to be meeting yesterday morning in the presidential palace to discuss the siege that followed the seizing last Tuesday night - the birthday of Japanese Emperor Akihito - of around 500 diplomats, politicians and business leaders.The left-wing Tupac Amaru rebels were yesterday still holding 490 hostages.Before that meeting, inside the Japanese mansion rebel leader Andante Emilio Huerta and other members of the MRTA chose ambassadors Anthony Vincent of Canada, Heribert Woeckell of Germany, Alcibiades Karokis of Greece and the French attache, Hyacinthe D'Montera, to relay their list of demands. Television reports speculated the shot had been calculated to silence restive hostages. They walked slowly and looked dazed. Earlier, a single shot heard within the Japanese embassy compound ended two days of silence as delicate negotiations continued. Three Red Cross officials accompanied the four men out of the compound. Peruvian rebels holding about 400 hostages at the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima released four captives yesterday evening.