You've got to admire Umberto Brindani's brass neck. Amid a predicable firestorm over his Italian magazine's decision to publish a picture of the dying princess Diana, the editor defended the image as "touching" and "tender".
"She is not dead in the picture but looks as if she is a sleeping Princess," he added, treating a piece of apparently blatant sensationalism as if it were an aesthetic triumph.
No British papers have published the image and it's hard to imagine any will, given the opprobrium that would be heaped on them if they did. More importantly, there is very little if any "public interest" justification for breaching the parameters of good taste in such a way.
Perhaps Mr Brindani should be congratulated for his lack of hypocrisy in failing to reach for the kind of ethical fig-leaf one imagines a British editor would deploy in similar circumstances. "I published the picture for a very simple reason - it has never been seen before," he said.
If that's what readers of Chi magazine want, maybe that's fair enough. And perhaps it's somewhat self-serving of British papers, which all used to feed off Diana pictures while she was alive, to denounce the pictures so furiously.
