HOW do you start a cult? Ask Earl Spencer. As one who, on your behalf, was at the funeral at Westminster Abbey it's starting to dawn that the eloquently angry speech he made then held a meaning deeper and shallower than any of us imagined.

All that passion spent on a eulogy in which we thought we heard a heartfelt cry to allow his sister some dignity, at last, in death. You could hear the damp crushing of a hundred hankies in the pews, the guilty shuffling in the press corral as he tongue-lashed the intrusive antics of the media, the thunderous clapping from the crowds outside, the snuffling and the sobs that sighed: ah, yes, someone understands; someone cares that she deserved more respect, if not because she was a princess then at least because she was a human being.

Now, less than a year on, it seems that the clenched voice was sounding much less than we believed and no more than

self-serving guff.

Love is more than a feeling: it's a behaviour. And Earl Spencer has revealed his true feelings by inventing The Diana Experience at Althorp. It is a monument to the defining vulgarity of the century's close. You could, I suppose, argue that as an ardent shopper herself his sister would have quite understood why a shopping arcade selling gee-gaws - all in the best possible taste, of course - would not defile her memory. But a teashop? What's that to venerate? Her eating disorder?

Sadly, the idea of profiting from the celebrity death is not new. The best career advice to any parvenu celebrity must be to pass over and ensure a glamorous afterlife. You won't be around to spend the riches, but your memory will live on in a million plastic keyrings.

The Earl is nothing if not shrewd. Althorp will never be another Graceland, he insists. But where's the difference? Both commemorate the freakish cult of celebrity. Theme park or shrine, both make money out of death.

The Earl promises to give away the profits from the entrance fees. So what will happen to the huge income all those thousands of pilgrims shuffling around the renovated stable block generate for Althorp House?

This week, the Earl deigns to grace the pages of the celeb-zine Hello!. You couldn't buy nine pages of better PR. But then he didn't have to. He is adamant that he is protecting his sister's memory. Others may be equally adamant that he stands to by exploiting her name and the gullibility of those prepared to pay #9.50 to the greater glory of the Spencer estate.

There were those, in the midst of last year's heady unreality, who said, look, here is what aristocracy is about, here is an aristocrat showing noble qualities, noblesse oblige, to all those millions who wanted to mourn Diana's death with him. See, at least he's in touch with popular sentiment; look, he knows what was done to her by the Establishment; listen, he's not going to let them weasel out and claim her as their own. And those of us who believed the aristocracy to be the elevation of a

gene-thinned, bone china-boned class whose very existence rots initiative in the hearts of common people kept still.

No more the hero, then; where does that leave the argument for the retention of a system of inherited privilege? Aristocracy is about lingering social distinctions that mean nothing, nothing, why nothing at all. Oh, I'm as snobbish as any of you. But me, I'm snobbish about my snobbery. My snobbery will not be the elevation of thinned-out blondes with cold blue blood and a fierce attachment to

self-perpetuation, to a rigid,

head-bowed social structure. My snobbery is about the right to

re-invent yourself outside a rigid imposed social structure, a snobbery of vigour and opportunity and humour.

No doubt the Althorp mausoleum will be in the best possible taste. No doubt it will pay tribute to Princess Diana's life works. But, as the telephone bookings come in and the credit cards numbers are checked, we might wonder which aspects of her life will it celebrate? The health clubs, the exotic holidays, and the designer frocks? Or the campaign against landmines, the work for the poor, the identification with the homeless?

When Laertes leapt into his sister's grave, Hamlet jumped in after him to show that he loved Ophelia more than 40,000 brothers would find possible.

Self-indulgence, show, ostentatious grief - the kind of exhibitionism that will be on show at Althorp. Such conspicuous mourning is less a tribute to the dead than a cry for recognition from the mourners.

The pain when we lose somebody we love is far too personal an emotion to become public property. Some people don't hold back the tears. Others cannot bear to let them out. Earl Spencer may argue that he is perpetuating his sister's memory at Atlhorp in a way to which he is entitled because she believed emotion to be better expressed than hidden. She was the touchy-feely princess.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, in Spring and Fall, softly reminds Margaret of the true reason for her grieving over Goldengrove unleaving. It is, he said, yourself you mourn for.

But therapeutic though it may be to show mourning, is there not something cold and unfeeling about selling or booking a ticket for that experience months ahead?

The curse of our time is the belief that anything and everything can be bought and sold. Earl Spencer is proposing to sell the memory of his sister. Millions are prepared to buy it. There are some things that should not be sold. The grave of a young mother who died in a car crash is one of them.