KEY POINTS:
Climate change is the new Aids, and Al Gore is the new Princess Diana. Saving the planet from global warming has become the cause of choice for the guilty chic - and the analogies between climate change and Aids don't stop there.
Both have created marvellous opportunities for fading rock stars and passe politicians to revive their careers. Why should these B-listers be content with composting their kitchen scraps, recycling the wine bottles, growing their own lettuces or (gasp) catching a train when they can really prove they care by appearing live on telly before millions of suckers in an over-hyped, under-rated, cutely named concert?
Pity that Sir Bob Geldof's pissed at Al Gore for pinching the brand "Live", but he'll get over it, just like he moved on from the spectacular failure of his own rock band.
Both Aids and climate change have provoked hysterical condemnations from the more looney men of the cloth. Aids, we were told in the 1980s, was a sign that God punishes those who behave in a licentious and libidinous manner. Gays and lesbians, these devout and self-righteous nutters thundered, were reaping exactly what they had sown. Sodom and Gomorrah was alive and well in the bath-houses of San Francisco.
Just last week a cluster of assorted British clergy, their brains possibly desiccated from years of celibacy (or illegal sex), shrilled that Britain's summer of floods was the result of loose sexual morals. Who needs the Met Office with science like this?
So what does it mean, I wonder, when a pop star like Madonna, who once posed naked as a coffee table and hitch-hiked naked down a US highway to attract publicity, reinvents herself as someone who cares so deeply about saving the planet that she's prepared to put aside the latest catalogue advertising African babies for adoption, be driven in a limousine through clamouring crowds of slappers and chavs, and sing to end global emissions? I suspect only God himself knows the answer to that.
But what a load of cant that Live Earth concert was. Why should countries like India and China which, with numerous smaller poor nations, are the worst polluters, sacrifice economic progress and deny their dirt-poor citizens the chance of a minute fraction of Madonna and Gore's kind of wealth, just because it's suddenly cool to be an eco-warrior?
If Princess Diana was alive she would have been on stage, (though not with Madonna - even a wide-screen can accommodate only one airhead at a time), dancing for the cameras in a specially made, eco-friendly Donatella Versace dress. Tina Brown, former Vanity Fair editor told us this week upon the launch of her book, The Diana Chronicles, that today, "when celebrity humanitarianism is all the rage, it's easy to forget that Diana got there first".
Brown's unmitigated drivel in USA Today about the "first Establishment leader to hug an Aids baby" didn't stop there. The world, she wrote, will never see Diana's, "first facelift, second divorce, addiction to text-messaging, iPod William would have given her, bombshell decision to adopt an African baby".
What is it about beautiful women that turns intelligent people into idiots? Even Alastair Campbell, former press secretary to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and last week's other uber-author with the publication of The Blair Years, went mushy peas when Diana "made me a cup of tea". Her most intelligent comment upon their meeting? "Wouldn't it be hilarious if there were a photographer around now?"
In 1997, when I was researching a book in London, I dined several times with journalist Yvonne Ridley. She told me about Diana's media manipulation, in particular after Will Carling (rumoured to be romantically linked with her) went on television with his wife and declared that no one would harm their marriage.
Diana, Ridley recalled, telephoned Carling and asked if he would bring around the autographed Lions jerseys he'd promised the boys. Just before he left her place around 10pm, Diana stuck her head out the door to check for paparazzi. The coast, she said, was clear. Carling then stepped out into a blaze of flashbulbs, Diana having tipped off her favourites. The marriage was doomed when photos of guilty-looking Carling leaving the Princess' palace were published the next day.
What Diana wanted, Diana stamped her foot and got and, in one way, Tina Brown is right: Today's celebrity humanitarianism is, like Diana's, calculated to obtain the maximum publicity. In her daffy list of rhetorical questions, however, Brown didn't ask who Diana might eventually have married. Al Gore, perhaps?
