BY ALAN HAMILTON

CONDEMNATION from St James's Palace and friends of Diana, the late Princess of Wales, greeted publication yesterday of extracts from a book by Patrick Jephson, her former private secretary. Palace officials, although privately relieved that the extracts in The Sunday Times contain virtually no new substantive disclosures on the Princess's relations with the Royal Family, said that it could cause only further distress to her children. One of her former confidantes described it as a "brutal, cowardly and one-sided assassination of her character".

Buckingham Palace, which last week issued a joint statement on behalf of the Queen and the Prince of Wales condemning the book's publication, reiterated its dismay that a highly placed former courtier had broken the cardinal rule of confidentiality. However, even the Queen's staff privately viewed it as subjective and one-sided. "We leave it to people to read it and judge for themselves," the Palace said.

Jephson, who worked for the Princess from 1988 until his resignation in January 1996, paints a picture of an already unstable woman who was driven to deviousness and lying, and a craving for attention, after separation from her husband in 1992. "Being content was not a natural state for her. Given the chance, she always preferred to plot and maneuver," he writes.

Jephson claims that the Princess was forced to become a rebel because of "a chronic feeling of rejection" by some, unnamed, members of the Royal Family. He suggests that the Queen herself felt some generosity of spirit towards Diana but was too determined to remain above the Wales�s' marital bickering to show it.

"The fact that the Princess may have needed an inordinate amount of indulgent handling, must have been alien to the Queen and others of a generation which prized above all else the ability to control emotion and suppress spontaneity. But I felt it was their duty to make whatever effort necessary on a personal basis to understand the Princess and then to persist in affectionate attempts to lead her into safer paths," Jephson writes.

After her separation, Jephson claims, the Princess became increasingly unstable, self-indulgent and unpredictable. She developed so many personae that "sitting in the car with her was like dealing with a minibus of Princesses". She ended up, he claims, with a developing death wish.

Of her huge public appeal, Jephson says: "Too many people's hopes rested on a belief that she was as wholesome as she looked."

Throughout his eight years at St James's Palace, Jephson asserts that the Princess was bulimic, contrary to reports that she had conquered the eating disorder. Behind her emotional instability he detected that some unconscious childhood memory was constantly being replayed. She displayed "insecurity in her attractiveness, a passionate need for unconditional love, an obsession with establishing emotional control, and a sabotaging approach to relationships".

In the opinion of a senior relationship counselor who knew the Princess, according to the book, her own experiences in childhood, including the protracted pain of her parents' acrimonious divorce, permanently damaged her ability to give and receive love.

"Her constant search for affection was cruelly matched by an inability to accept true devotion when it was offered, no matter how generously. No matter, either, whether it was offered by a kind-hearted man or a besotted world. Only in her devotion to her children, and in their unconditional love for her, did she seem to find release."

Jephson says it is no secret that towards the end of her life some of her critics questioned her mental stability. "Their invective might have been better channeled into recognition of her endurance in circumstances that would have driven a lesser person round the bend."

The Princess is portrayed in her last years as a woman fighting a constant war. At best it was a war to establish herself as an independent, globe-trotting channel for good works. At worst, it was a struggle within herself for control of everyone and everything she could reach.

Jephson says he remained loyal to his employer until she gave her celebrated Panorama interview in 1995 without telling him or any of her staff. He says that the final straw was receiving, like other employees, poisonous personal messages from her on his pager. He resigned in January 1996, convinced that he was about to be dismissed anyway.

One of the Princess's former confidantes said yesterday: "It is a very unpleasant book; the whole thing reeks of revenge."

Shadows of a Princess, by Patrick Jephson, to be published by HarperCollins on October 9; �17.99