The remarkable thing about the latest twist in the Windsor knot is not whether Diana did or did not describe the Conservative government as "hopeless" in an article in Le Monde (something half the population of Britain demonstrably agree with) but that something so irrelevant could kick everything else off the front page.

Admittedly, the timing was perfect, a year to the day that the royal divorce was made absolute; but don't let anyone kid themselves that there was anything constitution-shattering about her apparently partisan remarks. For all the Tory squawking of "offside", the fact is that rules were changed a year ago when she was dropped from the Royal Squad and her HRH strip removed.

It was front page news not because it was important but because these days the media gives the people what they want. And the British public, tabloid to broadsheet, want Charles and Di. Nothing to do with the romance of the monarchy, just romance per se.

We were cheated of Edward and Wallis, having come in at the very last page, but with these two we were there from the start. We've followed the twists and turns of the tortured tale, chapter by chapter, assimilated new characters, been moved, irritated, shocked and appalled. And we want to read on.

Everyone is fascinated by love affairs. With Charles and Di, we don't have to get personally involved, we just have to follow the story.

On one side of the emotional divide are the star-crossed lovers, separated by duty and fate. Will they find true happiness? On the other, can the callow playboy be redeemed by the wronged, damaged wife and make her whole again? Or will he turn out to be the bounder he appears.

As in any good novel, the central characters grow as the story develops. Their actions increase our understanding of what makes them tick, which means that sometimes we get there before them. The drug is in the detail.

Romantic fiction may have a down market ring to it but from Tolstoy to Austen, Hemingway to Marquez, great literature has always been as concerned with affairs of the heart as Mills and Boon. Bridget Jones's Diary is no great work of literary fiction, yet this middle-class tale of the perfidy of men has spent the summer at the top of the best seller list in Britain, making its author, Helen Fielding, a fortune.

A love story, predictable in the extreme (the hero is even called Darcey), what makes it kick is its immediacy, its disconnected narrative that reads as if it were real life. Last week alone, it sold over 15,000 copies.

For all its palaces and yachts, the Windsor knot is real life, where fact is better than fiction. In her choice of causes to espouse, Diana provides metaphors no novelist could better.

Landmines: volatile, hidden only inches below an innocent-looking surface, likely to blow up at any moment with no apparent warning. AIDS: devastating consequences of a sexual relationship which, at the time, seemed perfectly safe; its dangers discovered only when it's too late.

Life after divorce is itself proving a minefield: she steps this way and that, going down roads she would be well advised to avoid. Sometimes they explode (taking her sons to see The Devil's Own; her trip to Angola), sometimes they don't (the James Hewitt video, and, so far at least, Dodi Fayed). The engine of all story-telling is conflict. In this one the conflicts are infinite. Charles v Di; Charles v the people; Charles v the church; Di v the press; Di v the courtiers. Currently, Di v politicians. Then we have the sideshows: Di and the soothsayers, Charles and his plants.

Best of all are their internal conflicts. Happiness v duty for one, humanitarian mother v jet-setting cover girl for the other. Yet it is just these conflicts that give the story its staying power.

When Andrew Morton's bombshell of a book exploded onto an innocent world in 1992, it was hard to believe, and many didn't. Because all we knew of the story until then was the expurgated version and nothing Morton revealed equated with what we had been told.

How could he not love her, we chimed? How could be prefer this lump of a hausfrau to delectable, doe-eyed Di?

Now we know better. Charles and Di were as suited as Mo Mowlem and Noel Gallagher. As most people would now accept, Camilla is just what Charles needs - a steady, jolly girl who laughs like a horse and who is happiest in the saddle or in Wellingtons. Who cares what she looks like? She certainly doesn't. A shared sense of humour is what really counts.

The Windsor marriage is an uncanny mirror of an earlier dynastic marriage, when Charles's great grandfather, later to be Edward VII, married Alexandra of Denmark, a Protestant princess who turned out to be a beauty and captured the hearts of the people. The future king's neglect of her did not go down well. His most famous and long-term mistress was none other than Camilla's great-grandmother, Alice Keppell.

YET that royal marriage "worked out". Which is to say it created no constitutional crisis. Alix was content to sit on the sidelines and sew. But did they really think Diana would do the same? Perhaps if she'd been just 10 years older she might have done. It seems the Parker Bowles's marriage was as "flexible" as either party wanted it, as long as the Sunday joint was on the table, paid for by him, cooked by her.

The attitude to Camilla is already changing. The editor of the Sun, no less, is a friend and a fan. Forget the church's carping. Blair and his boys can sort that out.

It's just a question of the great British public getting used to the idea. Ultimately, they are great ones for doing the right thing and mistresses are not part of the nation's culture; though whether this ordinary woman would want a life in the limelight is another matter.

As for Diana, the denouement is not clear at all; the two sides of her conflicting personality show little sign of reaching an accommodation. No one begrudges her a romance in the sun, but whether the love light in his eyes will survive an English winter is another matter. His history so far would suggest not. Both Dodi and Dodi's daddy are trophy hunters and, once won, trophies tend to lose their shine.

Frankly, Di, the jump from the Windsors to the Fayeds is pure frying pan to fire.

She will soon be put to the test. On September 18th, the Serpentine Gallery, in London's Hyde Park, is reopening after a refit, the same gallery where Diana made her celebrated appearance in a thigh-exposing, figure-hugging dress the night her husband confessed his adultery on television.

The gala is to be hosted by the American glossy magazine, Vanity Fair, the same Vanity Fair which is in a massive libel action with Mohammed al Fayed. Will Diana court his displeasure by publicly enjoying his tormentors' hospitality? Or will she duck out? Only time, or the Times, or the Daily Mirror, or the Telegraph, or the Sun, will tell.