The sob beneath the simper

This book looks like a Barbie doll's handbag. Its exterior is shocking pink, with the title in white and gold. The interior, too, might make Barbie proud: glittering, girlie, easy on the immature eye and, so far as world significance is concerned, decidedly ersatz.

That is not to say the handbag is without merit. The inside pockets contain neatly sorted items collected from friends or picked up from the byways and avenues of two glitzy lives: those of the author and her deceased subject, the Princess of Wales. Indeed, Brown is at pains to have these thoroughfares converge. "Around the time Diana moved into Coleherne Court, I moved into the editor's office at Tatler, charged, at the age of 25, with reviving the fortunes of what had once been Hello! magazine of Gosford Park." And: "When we had lunched together in New York in July [1997] she was so self-possessed, so exhilaratingly focused."

Elsewhere, however, we learn that her exhilarating focus was not terribly inspiring, for "her needs at this juncture had more in common with those of second-act sirens like Elizabeth Hurley...". Ouch!

What else do we find in Barbie's handbag? Are the contents interesting? Before answering those questions, perhaps I should own up to two previous, journalistic encounters with the Diana business.

The first was on 14 August 1997, when, at the request of the Melbourne Sunday Age, I wrote a story about the Princess of Wales's romance with Dodi Fayed, son of the Harrods owner. Not having the slightest interest in the subject, I nevertheless obliged. The only thing in it of retrospective interest was in the second paragraph which speculated that "the latest Di-Dodi diversion may turn out to be as dead as the dodo". Just 17 days after penning that light- hearted alliterative prediction, they both departed this world.

My second encounter was in covering Diana's funeral for this newspaper. Mingling with the crowds at Althorp, where she was buried, I had my eyes truly opened. Grown-up, intelligent-looking people were behaving like pre-teen children who'd lost their dolls. There were wailings and kneelings, prostration before an invisible "queen", and all the evidence of a multitude losing its mind in a lachrymose dirge to a premature fin d'ete. It made me pessimistic about the degree of JOHN gullibility, intemperance and love of fiddlefaddle to which the nation was - is - yielding itself. As a former contributor to the magazine Vanity Fair when Tina Brown was its editor, I very much regret that her book does-n't much relieve my pessimism.

But, yes, some of the contents are interesting if you are at all interested, and have acquired, since that fateful Paris evening on 31 August 1997, tunnel vision. The author takes us back to the enthronement of Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Margaret's love life, calls for hanging even mild critics of the monarchy, "Sloanies"- slavering tabloids, Prince Charles's desire to live as a Tampax, and so on. She reminds us, too, that Diana's death - an event thoroughly and intelligently recorded here - did not simply produce a woebegone nation; in the years since the tragedy a boorish Prince Philip "has mellowed a lot".

There is a lot about the Parker Bowleses' "faithless" marriage which should warm the cockles of the readers' hearts with its overtones of Bridget Jones. Oh, all right, here's an example: "Andrew had had affairs throughout their courtship, and he didn't stop after the wedding. Camilla once described to a girlfriend, Carolyn Benson, a Bridget Jones moment when she let herself into Andrew's apartment with her key and discovered her lover 'distinctly uncomfortable'. A quick search of the flat revealed a married beauty 'crouched behind a sofa, quietly sobbing'."

It is baubles like the above which emit from Brown's book a whiff of Murdochianism. It feeds on an echelon of society as greedy as it is merciless: a nauseous mixture of luxury and flunkeyism, waste and disorder; an incurable air of falsity and presumption, and bedroom gossip masquerading as perky persiflage.

The British people, according to the author, couldn't get enough of Diana worship and Diana grief because they'd "had enough of stone- faced authority figures giving them castor oil and telling them to sit up straight".

Brown claims (and I don't doubt her) that Diana "looked increasingly to the press for the reassurance she wasn't getting at home. Its fascination with her mounted daily". This was at a time when many serious newspapers were becoming less so, instead concentrating on the more "explosive" T'n'T - the trite and trashy - in the belief that it was what the public wanted in what may well be regarded as a mindless period of history; a blank in the development of human intellect. In encouraging the press to log her every move, word and whim, the princess could be said to have joined the equivalent of the Roman Bestiarii, the men chosen to fight for their lives with wild beasts. In Brown's book, these are called "the press pack".