Are we so traumatised by terror that gossip needs a rape to grab our attention?

Does our fear of war surface in our morbid obsession with untried, unanswered allegations of rape?

It is almost two weeks now since the collapse of Paul Burrell's theft trial, and still the front-page controversy rages. On one level, Fleet Street's seemingly insatiable obsession with the story speaks for itself. Simply, it is shifting product, as gossip involving the royals, and especially Diana, is always expected to do.

The Daily Mirror, having secured the exclusive rights to tell Mr Burrell's story, has been an obvious beneficiary, with its sales up by 330,000 copies on the first day of the serialisation and staying high all through last week. Yet, by signing him up at a bargain rate, without imposing any conditions on Mr Burrell, the Mirror has sent its rivals into a frenzy of jealous, zealous "spoiling". And what dirt has been excavated, with lurid tales of homosexual rape in the pantry, and rather less lurid suggestions of possibly inappropriate, possibly sexual behaviour between royal and servant. All this has been laid out for the consumer's entertainment, but, lest it make the readers feel a little bit dirty, ostensible constitutional reasons have been raised to justify its appearance as well.

This story is so huge, the justificatory subplot goes, because there is a serious danger that the Royal Family will be damaged. Republicans, worried right-wing commentators cluck, are loving all this squalor, all this smear, because it will bring the royals into disrepute.

Do they really believe themselves? A couple of weeks ago, the words "James Hewitt's signet ring" were deemed by a judge to be too sensitive for the nation to hear. On that measure of cringing obsequiousness, this "incident" between royal and servant might be nothing much more than the pair of them sitting on the same sofa, buttocks touching, while they watched Coronation Street. Anyway, whatever this incident is, the sole witness to it has already been ruthlessly discredited as an alcoholic and a madman.

And what will it all amount to anyway? Even when damaging royal gossip is widely disseminated, the royals are always strangely impermeable. Remember when Charles'n' Camilla was nothing more than an unspeakable rumour that could, if it ever got out, "seriously damage the monarchy"?

Meanwhile, the fact remains that for Republicans, more than monarchists, the behaviour of individuals within the monarchical system is not the point. It is the system, and what it symbolises, that is wrong, with the behaviour of the people within it either entirely irrelevant or merely corroborating evidence. If the nation demanded a moral Royal Family, Britain would have been forced into Republicanism long ago.

The truth in this day and age is that the majority seem to enjoy the spectacle of the royal individuals being the frail and all-too-human repositories of the "timeless values" they are charged with representing. In the modern royals, dysfunctional present lends paradoxical lustre to glorious past. Somehow the conclusion that the whole edifice is, and always has been, phoney is too terrible to contemplate.

And on a deeper level, that surely is exactly what is going on here. The newspapers may have carried speculation yesterday about how the Royal Family is "cracking under the pressure". But we did not actually see that. Yes, the pictures yesterday of Elizabeth and Charles showed that they were indeed looking grim. But would anything other than grimness be appropriate as they stood before the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday?

We've only just buried one Royal whose great myth was that she won a war for us. As we amble again toward war, the royals are back in harness, taking our minds right off the death and the misery to come in a tide of innuendo and allegation.

Yet isn't it odd that in an autumn that has seen a huge military build-up backed by a massive diplomatic build-up, all the celebrity tittle-tittle that has proved to be most transfixing has centred on rape?

Finally, after it had dragged on for months, the Barrymore scandal finally provoked disgust. In the time since Stuart Lubbock's body was found in his pool, Mr Barrymore had continued to host television shows, had received a viewers' award for his broadcasting and had signed a lucrative book deal with the BBC. Then, suddenly and about time too, a vicious rape and unexplained death were more than the national morality could bear.

Likewise, after days of dull serialisation, Ulrika Jonsson's autobiography suddenly became interesting when it turned out that there were within its covers allegations of rape to be tested. And here, in the autumn's latest feeding frenzy, it is the whiff of rape that has got the tabloids scenting blood.

There has not been much coverage in the papers, though, of Afghanistan. In Sunday night's documentary, Lifting The Veil, there were rape allegations aplenty. It is not nice to know that while the allies unseated the Taliban regime, they failed so very completely to unseat the culture of violence against women that had given it its ghastly legitimacy.

There is so much at the moment that is not nice to know that celebrity and royal gossip is a tempting distraction. Does it speak of our inability completely to close our minds to the terror in the world that the gossip we turn to features so heavily the most personal of violations that war can bring? Does our fear of war surface in our morbid obsession with untried, unanswered allegations of rape?

For many such a suggestion will be seen as outlandish, as risible as Baudrillard's assertion after the Gulf War that it "didn't happen". Yet it is true that this upcoming war will be as impersonal as the last one waged against Saddam, with the ability of ordinary people to connect with the carnage greatly hampered by the broad front-line of technology that stands between us and "the enemy".

Our fears are not of personal loss, or sudden conscription. All that will be the stuff, in this unequal "struggle" to come, that only ordinary Iraqis endure en masse. Western war is now fought at a distance – a distance the bellicose as well as the squeamish find too great. In the war against the Taliban, the complaint was that too few British soldiers were drafted, with the few that actually got there given much too little to do. What would the dead we commemorated on Sunday make of that, I wonder?

Yet, if the nation's autumnal obsession with celebrity rape is not in some way a response to the imminent prospect of war, then isn't the conclusion that has to be drawn so much worse? It can only be that we are so uninterested in the world's ongoing peril, that we really do care more about the stuff the media finds it easier to flog to us; and so jaded is our taste for sexual gossip that only forced, violent sex gets us parted from our money.

In the face of such bleakness, the idea of rape as a metaphor for war seems somehow soothing. It's not much of a way for the nation to be involved in the international debate, but at least it's some sort of signal that reality is biting, no matter how hard we try to ignore it.

d.orr@independent.co.uk