She will be remembered by the way she liked her egg

Well, whoever was making the preparations for a national outpouring of grief over the death of Princess Margaret got a surprise.

In the obituaries, there was some creative searching for her achievements. Kenneth Rose explained how, at dinner, she would "demand an omelette, ask if she could exchange it for a boiled egg which in turn was rejected as too hard or too soft". Ah, you don't get characters like that any more.

But can there be a sadder way to be remembered than how you liked your egg? Surely the most nondescript person you've ever met has done enough to ensure that, at their funeral, the vicar won't be saying "but the thing we'll remember most about him is he liked a runny egg. Not too soft, mind, but so you could dip your bread in it all the way down. And so we say farewell to Tommy 'runny-egg' Jenkins".

Her other achievement appears to be "not being afraid to have a good time", which, according to one editorial, meant she was "instrumental in carrying the royal family into a new era". So she led a constitutional reform by drinking too much and smoking 60 a day. I'm generally impressed by drinking feats, but let's keep them in perspective and not pretend they change history. Unless we re-evaluate the past and say the great figures of the millennium were Leonardo, Darwin and Billy Mackenzie from Lowestoft who drank six pints of Guinness followed by a yard of cider without spilling a drop.

Besides, she was no pioneer of royal revelry. Henry VIII was hardly a model of sobriety, and George III was often paralytic. And the royals haven't been carried into a new era. Charles still isn't allowed to marry his girlfriend, and he had his wife, who he couldn't stand, picked for him. Maybe this is what David Blunkett means with his pledge to stop enforced marriages.

AN Wilson asked what life would have been like if she had been the elder sister of the famour pair. "This is one of the great ifs of the 20th century." Which it is, of course, just ahead of what if the Archduke of Austria had not been assassinated in 1914 or what if Hitler hadn't invaded Russia.

Almost every obituary commented on how Princess Margaret was denied the right to marry the man she loved. But no one said she couldn't marry him, only that if she did, she'd lose her royal status and be taken off the civil list. Her statement at the time insisted that she intended to "do her duty". Staying for months at a time in her holiday home in Mustique, that sort of duty. Spending every night at clubs like Quaglino's and the Café de Paris, duty, duty, duty.

If she was a footballer she'd have been fined and put on the transfer list. Her official "duties" were to be president of organisations such as the Girl Guide Association. I suppose she was the right person for teaching them how to slip out the back for a sly fag.

Then, in the Sixties, she said: "I have always tried to take some part of the burden off my sister." Just like any family, then. I suppose the Queen would ring up and say: "Margaret, could you look after the kids for me for a couple of hours while I nip into town and officially welcome the President of Ghana?"

She's been described as a "friend of the West Indies", because she went there a lot for holidays and ponced off West Indians.

On her favourite island, the charming Mustique, if a servant became pregnant, they were whisked from the island so the baby could not be born there, as this would allow them a handful of human rights. Perhaps Slobodan Milosevic should try this technique and claim he was a lover of Kosovo.

And what's all this about "the woman who so nearly became a monarch", as if the post has anything to do with talent, and she was the royal equivalent of Jimmy White never quite winning the world snooker title? It's not like the 11th century, when you could have an ambition to be monarch by planning to invade Yorkshire and kill your brother. She never quite made it because she was born after her sister, so she was stuffed from the start.

Because – and this is what royalists find so difficult to grasp – you don't have to do anything to be royal, you just are, which makes it not the hardest job in the world but the easiest. Even a road-sweeper requires a bit of training and ability, which is why you don't get any two-day-old baby road sweepers. But you can be a two-day-old princess because you're born, and then you're a princess.

So the only obituary that would really sum up her lifetime achievements would be: "Princess Margaret, who was born a princess, but worked her way up to become a princess." Which is why there are now florists all over Kensington complaining: "Bloody hell, what are we going to do with all these?"