What could not have been so easily predicted, in the struggle for interpretation that followed, was just how useful her tragic end would prove to be, or how shamelessly it would be exploited. Nor, in those first furious days afterward, would anyone have dared suggest that those who would profit most from her death would be those most immediately implicated in it: the tabloids.

I do not mean by this the instant boost in circulation that attends most horrific events, the commemorative editions and special pull-out sections with which a public fixation is cemented (it is hoped) into a Truly Historic Moment. Nor does the triumph of the tabloids consist merely in their adroit deflection of public anger away from themselves and onto the Royal family - - though this was miraculous enough. In the space of three days, the story was transformed from "paparazzi assassins" to "where is our Queen?", as if the issue were not that Diana should have been hounded to an early grave but that her former in-laws were not sufficiently broken up over it.

But of course that was the issue, or so it became, and that is the tabs' real victory in this sad affair: they have emerged not merely with bones and skin intact, but with the tabloid view of the universe entrenched as unassailable orthodoxy.

The tabloid cosmology may be seen in the tabs' three enduring obsessions: royalty, beauty, and various sorts of carnage. The element common to all three is fate, that mysterious organizing principle, not quite mystic, not quite rational, through which the random turns of human affairs are made intelligible, or at least bearable.

You do not aspire to noble birth: it is simply conferred upon you. You cannot choose to be physically beautiful, try as we might: you either are, or you are not. There is nothing fair about either attribute, no means of ensuring that they are apportioned to the most deserving. And yet we worship them just the same. Or rather, we worship royalty and beauty because they are so inexplicably assigned. They seem to suggest some hidden hand, which we are powerless to control: if not God, then fate. And the tabloids, as the chosen reading material of the powerless, are the choir in the church of fate.

In a strange way, a terrible accident, the "cruel twist of fate" that is the tabloids' other stock in trade, inspires the same sort of reverence. You see these stories every day: had he only left the coffee shop two minutes earlier, had he not stopped for a second cup, he would not have been in the path of the runaway semi-trailer as he pulled out onto the highway. Some such twist of fate, of course, can be found in every story, if you look hard enough: that is the nature of human intelligence, working overtime to construct some meaning out of the void. It does not matter. To the tabs, it is revelation.

And so we return to Diana: both royal and beautiful, and now the victim of a freakish accident -- yet one that, as more than one commentator remarked, seemed somehow fated, inevitable, like something out of Greek tragedy. In the earliest aftermath, this fed the search for scapegoats, as if it were the press, and not a drunken hireling of her boyfriend's, who had been driving the speeding Mercedes. There must have been a reason, after all, for this to occur, some cause behind events; and if there is a cause, there must be something or someone to blame.

Yet if the cult of fate inspires reverence, it also inspires revulsion. For the cruellest fate of all is to be condemned to choose: to be, in fact, the agent of your own fate. Much of Diana's life was, like her death, beyond her choosing. But, unlike the family into which she married, she had a choice in whether or not to assume the responsibilities of royalty. This, in the end, was what she could never endure. It is comforting to believe our fates are fixed: by the stars, by the gods, by the powers that be. It is daunting to know that we must choose our own course.

And so she rebelled, accepting the blessings of celebrity but chafing at the self-discipline it requires. She became the darling of all those who yearn to have things boths ways, the patron saint of the self-absorbed, the goddess of the soft option. How comforting, then, her death, not least for the tabs: not human error, but fate's revenge.