Comment from The Northern Echo: Unsavoury lure of royal secrets

He has betrayed her memory by selling her secrets.

Mr Burrell compounds his crime by hinting that there are far more salacious revelations to come one day - his claim that he knows ''everything there is to know'' about the Queen sounds suspiciously like a threat to publish the dirt on her, too.

Extraordinarily, he claims that his current book is a ''warm and loving'' tribute to Diana, even though it has exposed the secrets of her bedchamber - she had nine unknown lovers according to him - and has enraged her sons.

You might expect, then, that any newspaper that paid Mr Burrell money for his shameful secrets would be shunned. You might expect, therefore, that any television programme that gave him a platform on which he limply tried to justify his actions would be turned off. And you might expect, then, that his book was left unsold on the shelves.

None of this has happened. The book flew so fast off the shelves that, here in the North-East, many shops had sold out within three hours.

The Mirror newspaper, which serialised Mr Burrell's revelations, has put on up to 250,000 additional sales a day.

Mr Burrell's revelations last November also added 200,000 a day to the Mirror's sale. What businessman would not welcome such a return for so little work?

Of course, most decent-minded people claim not to be interested in this dirty tittle-tattle - but nearly all of them have an opinion on how Diana died and on the Royal Family's involvement in that death. While saying that it is dreadful that Burrell has sold the secrets, they appear to have been secretly reading every one of them.

If we are serious about laying Diana to rest and allowing her unfortunate sons to get on with their lives, the British people must come to terms with their addiction to the soap opera. This soap opera's increasingly convoluted plotline is damaging the Royal family with every twist that it takes.