Tara Palmer-Tomkinson: If-You've-Got-It Flaunt-It-Girl

She says she's mad as a box of frogs. Few are inclined to disagree with her. Which is why her tearful, wobbly-throwing spoilt little rich girl act on the tackiest survival show on television is going to take her a stumbling step closer to the celebrity status she believes is rightfully hers

When Tara Palmer-Tomkinson told her friends and family that she had been asked to appear on Carlton TV's I'm a Celebrity: Get Me Out of Here, the majority view was "leave well alone". Their objections were not, as might be assumed, that it would be unseemly for an upper-middle-class girl, friend of the royal princes, to break sweat on national television with self-publicists such as Christine Hamilton and Uri Geller. They feared a repeat of her first brush with fame.

For anyone who has not seen the show, it goes like this: eight celebrities of D-ranking status are plonked into a jungle in Queensland, Australia, and are eliminated by the public via telephone voting after being effectively stripped of their dignity by a series of gruesome tasks. Going into last night's penultimate show, they were down to the last three: Tony Blackburn, Christine Hamilton – and Palmer-Tomkinson.

As anyone who has ever read a gossip column knows, Palmer-Tomkinson is a re- covering cocaine addict, a condition brought on, she says, by attending too many parties when she was London's leading "It" girl. Some felt that appearing on a show like I'm a Celebrity, with all the attendant media interest and public fascination, would send her hurtling back into crash-and-burn mode. And things have not been too good for her lately. She recently split up with her boyfriend, the restaurateur Anton Bilton, who had been a steadying hand on the widely erratic TPT tiller for some 18 months; he appears to have dumped Palmer-Tomkinson to be with one of her best friends, the singer Lisa B. And then there was the widely held view, to an extent corroborated by parents and by her behaviour on the show, that the poor lass was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But Palmer-Tomkinson, who is now 31, was unmoved by their reasoning.

So there she is, the undoubted star of this Big Brother-style contest. Whether she wins or not is irrelevant. She is about to experience her next 15 minutes of fame, but this time she hopes to get more out of it than a few free frocks and an addiction to Class A drugs. First, she wants the public to discover the inner Tara – "as mad as a box of frogs, a bit eccentric, very childlike, but intelligent with a good brain", is her own appraisal. And then she wants to use that good brain – she actually has three good A-levels, plays the piano, and is well read – to launch a new career. "There's a TV show that I want to present and I need to raise my profile in order to do it. I need to become a household name and I don't cut it at the moment."

Well, will her masterplan work? Certainly she is the most watchable beast in the compound and has become the bookies' joint favourite to win. But why? Her friend Normandie Keith, the wealthy American socialite, says, "You never have to guess what she's thinking because she tells you." That sort of candour, of course, is perfect for the show. It also helps that she broke the monotony of the programme, which can be considerable, by attempting to lure the "actor, singer and entertainer" Darren Day, a man who has carried the moniker "love rat" to extremes, into a tryst – and failed! Her friends, her family, even the television-viewing public must have screamed, "No, don't do it, Tara. You'll end up looking a fool", but she did. The producers should give her a bonus.

One wonders if her parents, Patty and Charles Palmer-Tomkinson, envisaged their darling daughter earning her living by being showered with maggots when she was growing up on their idyllic 1,220-acre estate in Hampshire. The pair are both close friends of the Prince of Wales (he is Tara's godfather). Indeed it was through this connection, while skiing in Klosters with the royal party, that she was given the chance to fulfil her childhood ambition – to be famous (what for was never specified). She was snapped by the paparazzi looking fetching in a tight ski suit back in 1994 and this later resulted in her being proclaimed the supreme It girl (from she's got it, or, if you like, what exactly is it you do?) by Tatler magazine. After that, the gossip columns would not leave her alone, and she loved it. "There is no surprise about the way she's turned out," says a friend of Tara's. "She was the youngest [she has a sister and brother] and very spoilt and indulged. I cannot remember a time when she wasn't seeking attention, playing the piano or storming around."

Palmer-Tomkinson is not rich in her own right, although she did boast to Darren Day that she was expecting a large legacy in January. She has exploited her fame to support her extravagant lifestyle. At the height of her celebrity she wrote a weekly diary about her life for The Sunday Times, scattering it with luxury brand names in order to secure free clothes, perfume and travel. She even appeared in a television advertisement for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Tacky, yes, but the money was rolling in.

But the fun-loving image fell apart following a toe-curling appearance on Frank Skinner's TV chat show in 1999 in which she appeared drunk or drugged or both. It was quite a performance; she revealed her Sunday Times scam to the world and asked if anyone would give her a free car. Soon after she admitted to her parents that she had a horrendous cocaine habit. They swiftly packed her off to the exclusive Meadows clinic in Arizona; she later claimed that her dependency almost killed her and had cost her close to a million pounds. It had been a bad time. "If only people knew how I felt," she said afterwards. "All I could think about was the next fix. I used to take the drug before going out. I couldn't face the world unless I was high." She now says she is clean and regularly attends Narcotics Anonymous meetings.

Tara's love life has been no more stable. Her consorts are mixed and varied and have included the millionaire restaurateur Mogens Tholstrup and a Rastafarian called Skinny Power. She makes no secret of wanting to get married, but when the proposal finally came it ended in bitter humiliation. Shortly after leaving the Meadows clinic she met and fell in love with Greg Martin, the son of the Beatles' producer Sir George Martin. The church was booked and her only worry was what she was going to call her marital Labradors. And then a newspaper revealed Martin had been married before (to get a Green Card to work in America) and she broke off the engagement. She now openly despairs of anyone ever asking her out again.

In many other respects, this moderately talented, well-connected girl of the shires is lucky. She is blessed with a loving and supportive family, and she has a gaggle of close and loyal friends, all of whom rally to her defence whenever she is attacked. And the mere fact that she is in the running to emerge victorious in IACGMOOH suggests that this poor little rich girl's fan base is getting bigger. Suffering, she has said, "makes you humble and a nicer person". And that is a good lesson for any It girl to learn.