Cocaine arrest marks a new low

James Hewitt has been saddled with a host of insulting epithets over the years - cad, bounder, royal love rat - but, as the latest extraordinary episode in his life emerged today, it all pointed to one sad, rather downbeat conclusion: being an out-and-out rotter is not as much fun as it looks.

For, despite the way Hewitt has handled himself since he became the nation's favourite pantomime villain, playing up to his role with breezy confidence, he has become as much an object of pity and derision as hatred and contempt.

Those early pictures of him with Princess Diana show a dashing young cavalry officer, and he served with some distinction in the first Gulf war as an officer with the Life Guards.

They first met at a Mayfair drinks party in 1986 when he was 28 and she was 25. She engaged him as a riding instructor, and they embarked on an affair which lasted five years. "Yes, I adored him. Yes, I was in love with him," Diana said in her 1995 Panorama interview. "But I was very let down."

He later co-operated with Anna Pasternak in a Mills and Boon-style volume called A Princess in Love.

The business with Diana's letters sank his reputation further. They were taken from his flat by his former fiancé¥ Anna Ferretti with the connivance of the Mirror, which passed them on to the police and then the Palace.

After a legal battle Hewitt got them back again: and then, after promising he would never sell them, he tried to do exactly that for up to ?10million.

He co-operated with a Channel 4 documentary, Confessions of A Cad, which included footage of him in the bath boasting about the size of his manhood, later complaining he had been set up by the makers. But as he said on the show: "They're doing it about me because I'm a complete s**t, and we're trying to make me less of a s**t. And it's not working."

More recently he won the Channel 5 show Back To Reality, but when he appeared at the recent recording of comic Jack Dee's new show he was booed.

Hewitt now gives all the signs of a man running out of options. He is writing a new book about his affair with Diana and his life since, and plans to reveal the behind-the-scenes secrets of the reality TV show and his friendship with Jodie Marsh.

Despite his reputation - and his own admission that he drinks too much - Hewitt has dated a string of blondes including Sarah Kozer who co-starred with him in the Channel 5 show, and Kate Simon the millionaire ex-wife of Peter Simon, head of Monsoon. His most recent girlfriend, Alison Bell, is a freelance presenter who started her career on radio in New Zealand. In 1983 she and Prince Edward had a fleeting relationship when the Prince was working as a part-time college teacher there.

In London she worked on ITN's rolling news channel, then Sky News. She also appears on LBC - where she met Hewitt when he was a phonein agony uncle.