I landed in London a few weeks ago on a historic day. For the first time in living memory, British royalty and private-sector greed hugged publicly when little plastic tubs of Flora margarine went on sale that Monday bearing the official logo of the Diana Memorial Fund. The logo is charmingly simple: just the word "Diana" handwritten in that broad curvy style so characteristic of convent-educated women the world over. Next to that logo was printed another word, saying - with matching simplicity and brevity, if not charm - "Thanks".The promotion is designed to raise at least 250,000 pound sterling for the Fund, as part of the margarine company's campaign which includes the Flora London Marathon with a fund-raising target of another 1.2 million pound sterling. Rather coyly, the company insisted it wouldn't benefit financially from the collections. It's fooling no one about the obvious benefits of associating a product with a celebrity.Admittedly, this is not the first time that Diana has posthumouslysupported a fund-raising venture in the UK. The Imperial War Museum in London uses her famous picture with a legless landmine victim in a lifesize poster on the city's Underground to draw people to its exhibits. The postal department promotes a charity lottery in her name. Road safety groups are firming up plans to launch an awareness drive for rear seat-belt use in a similar fashion. And London Walks has introduced, on popular demand, a Diana tour as the latest attraction among its tourist strolls in the city.But none of these projects reeked of the naked commercialization that permeated the Flora campaign. If you forgot for a moment the chaps who continue to make a decent little packet marketing Diana cutouts in the hundreds of newspaper stands across London, you would stop fawning over Flora. Among those who flayed the brazenness of this multimillion pound company was Diana's step-grandmother, Dame Barbara Cartland. "Her name, her image, everything about her memory is being commercialized, which is verysad and a great mistake," she lamented to a local newspaper.The newspapers themselves may pretend they don't know it, but they're without doubt an integral part of the problem. More then seven months after she was killed, the British media - the tabloids in particular - continue to cannibalise Diana's glamour and mystique, and more specifically her love affairs, for all they're worth. In my ten-day stopover in London (en route to the United States, where another media obsession, this time with the chief executive's zipper, awaits me), I saw the media's Dianamania stomping gleefully over major news events such as the Northern Ireland peace talks.So the Brits gorged last fortnight on a glut of Diana stories, though the emphasis has now shifted from the soap opera's protagonists to its supporting characters: Diana's butler Paul Burrell cavorted with Hollywood stars and assorted celebrities who paid the equivalent of 200,000 pounds sterling to attend a gala fund-raising dinner at a Beverly Hills hotel,and in return made them weep by recounting his memories of her in a post-dinner speech. Diana's psychic Rita Rogers claimed she'd forewarned the princess and her last lover Dodi about the crash that killed them. The estranged fiancee of Major James Hewitt, one of Diana's lovers, attempted to sell off letters written by Diana to the major, and was trapped by the Mirror, which righteously returned them to the palace and published the minutest details of the operation. And the Daily Mail continued its Sunday serialization of Diana - The Untold Story, written by two of its correspondents.Of course, some newspapers invoked the criterion of bad taste to decry the safety-belt campaign. But none bothered to see the irony of marketing margarine through the image of a woman with a chronic eating disorder called bulimia.
