[Red Moon]

Why sad, tormented pop icon Britney Spears will not be having such a happy 27th birthday today

She can't choose what she eats, drive her car or leave home alone - and she has TWO chaperones on every date. As Britney Spears mimes her way through a shambolic XFactor display, guess who's pulling the strings all over again?

As she celebrates her 27th birthday today, Britney Spears would have liked nothing better than a long lie-in and breakfast in bed. Her wish, however, has not been granted.

Instead, she will be roused in the early hours, drag herself out of yet another unfamiliar hotel bed and somehow summon up the energy for a live performance on Good Morning America to mark the release of her new album.

After a week in which she has performed - in an unnervingly erratic fashion - to more than 50 million television viewers during a whistle-stop tour of France, Germany, Britain and her native U.S., having a happy birthday is not a priority for this talented, yet troubled young woman.

For despite her fame and riches, Britney has made it clear all she wants is a quiet life. But as has become disturbingly clear in recent weeks, that idyll remains an impossible dream.

The stark reality is that as far as Britney Spears is concerned, she does not have a life. And ever since her affairs were put in the hands of her father, Jamie, and her wealthy lawyer, the aptly named Andrew Wallet, she has not been in a position to make any decisions for herself.

Along with her influential manager, Larry Rudolph, these men make up a triumvirate who control Britney. And as she prepares to embark on a massive global comeback tour, the 27-yearold finds herself stuck on an exhausting treadmill with no end to her travails in sight.

'Even when you go to jail you know there's the time when you're gonna get out,' she tearfully confesses in a new interview. 'But in this situation it's never-ending. It's just like Groundhog Day every day.

'There's no excitement, there's no passion. I think it's too in control. If I wasn't under the restraints I'm under, I'd feel so liberated. When I tell them the way I feel, it's like they hear but they're really not listening.'

For anyone who watched Britney's bizarre performance on The X Factor last Saturday, it will not come as a surprise to hear that she is struggling.

Dressed in an ill-advised outfit of hotpants, fishnets and knee-high boots, she gyrated unconvincingly to her new single, Womanizer, blatantly miming on a television show which, lest we forget, is a live singing contest.

Internet forums were jammed with complaints, with the majority agreeing with the comment that 'all she can do is mime - and not very well'.

Her humiliation was complete when the show's presenter, Dermot O'Leary, had to hand Britney his microphone because hers was nothing more than a prop. She then couldn't answer his question about how the competing acts had fared because she hadn't bothered to watch them.

Later the same evening, she disappointed hundreds of fans who had crammed into London's Astoria club to see her, only to discover that she was 'too shy' to go on stage.

A stark reminder, perhaps, that less than a year ago this fragile woman was being forcibly strapped to an ambulance trolley and wheeled off to the mental ward of a hospital.

Back then, she was sectioned twice in a month after doctors diagnosed her as being manic depressive with a borderline personality disorder, concluding that she was 'a danger to herself and to others'.

Her recovery - greeted with messianic fervour following a comeback at the MTV Awards in September - was initially seen as remarkable. The LA Times described her public appearance to accept three awards as a 'triumph of the Olympian kind'.

All she had done was to walk on stage and thank God 'for blessing me like this', but after a year in which she had lost custody of her two young sons and become so crazed that she had shaved her head in public, a slim and coherent Britney was a sight for sore eyes.

Now, however, the very regime which had saved her from madness is threatening to drive her back into the abyss. Since her father filed for legal ' conservatorship' this summer, so he could oversee her finances and personal affairs, Britney's life has been micromanaged to an extraordinary degree.

As the respected Rolling Stone writer Jenny Eliscu, who met Britney recently, puts it: 'She has about as many legal rights as when she was in the Mickey Mouse Club as a little girl.'

As her manager, Larry Rudolph, admits: 'Her job is to be Britney Spears, and that job bleeds into her personal life and creates this odd situation where she needs to have security people around her all the time.'

Just how severely she is controlled will come as a shock to many of her adoring fans.

As Britney increasingly rails against the constraints placed upon her, it has emerged that she is not allowed to drive her car or choose her own meals, cannot leave her home without permission, has all her telephone calls monitored and is watched over day and night by guards hired by her father - but paid for by her.

According to Britney herself, her father Jamie persuaded her to allow him control of her affairs so that he could help her to win back custody of her children from her ex-husband, Kevin Federline.

In this he has failed, yet his power remains complete. Indeed, such is the controlling manner of her father (who, until she took him back on board, was estranged from his family and eking out a living as a chef) that he recently fired a bodyguard who had allowed Britney make an unsupervised call on his mobile phone.

The chaperoning arrangement is so stringent that Britney is even obliged to take two members of her team on dates with her. On one recent romantic soirée she was accompanied by her assistant, Brett, and Adam Leber, one of Rudolph's employees.

It is almost beyond parody, and yet for a woman who is under strict orders to consume precisely 1,200 calories a day ('It may not sound like much, but it's actually a lot of food if you eat the right things,' she says) this is about as normal as life gets.

Thanks to her regime, she has recovered sufficiently to be allowed limited access to her children. But as far as the authorities are concerned, full custody remains a distant prospect because of her unpredictable moods and a history of 'habitual, frequent and continuous drug abuse'.

To her management team, however, it seems she is ready to work harder than ever before. Her new album, Circus, is likely to top the charts worldwide and she is in advanced preparations for a global tour.

Meanwhile, 'Team Britney' appear to think nothing of bundling her out for a televised performance in front of 13 million X Factor viewers.

Behind the scenes of last Saturday's show there were clear signs of her enduring fragility. It was widely reported that Britney had declined to mentor the competing acts on X Factor because there was insufficient time, but in truth she had declared herself too nervous to do so.

Her backstage demands, meanwhile, put all previous guests to shame. Whereas Mariah Carey (a notorious diva) was happy to prepare for her performance in a luxurious Winnebago, Britney insisted on taking over the sumptuous dressing room of Simon Cowell himself.

As she prepared for her miming performance, she gazed up at placards erected all around the room for her benefit, adorned with slogans including: 'You are an AMAZING dancer', 'Everybody LOVES you' and 'You're going to NAIL IT tonight'.

By all accounts, Britney was noticeably nervous before her performance, something which would previously have been anathema to the supremely confident star of old.

This, however, is the modern Britney. Hence the extraordinary lengths her people go to in protecting her.

Rolling Stone's Jenny Eliscu found interviewing Britney for the magazine's current cover story to be a 'rigorously micro-managed process'.

'We were never left alone together, and my questions had to be submitted ahead of time for approval,' she says.

No level of control can prevent public criticism, however, particularly when people feel they are being treated with contempt.

The miming issue on X Factor is a case in point. Previously, all the guests have sung live, but Britney's record company, Jive, insisted on having her contract altered to allow her to ' lipsync' instead.

Fans also noted with disgust that the performance was a carbon copy of those she had given in France and Germany on the two previous nights.

Afterwards, when she was supposed to make a less rigorously controlled appearance at London's Astoria, she suffered a bout of nerves.

Hundreds of devotees, who had waited for hours in cramped conditions to catch a glimpse of her, were forced to settle for the slim, bearded figure of her manager Larry Rudolph as he twice crept onto the stage before slipping out of view.

The club's promoter, Jeremy Joseph, says: 'I don't know why she didn't go on. She's really shy, and obviously she didn't feel confident enough. I tried to persuade her, but she said no.'

Her fans were furious, bombarding gossip websites with complaints about the perceived snub.

According to those who have worked with her over the years, however, there has been a noticeable change in Britney.

Her confidence has taken a huge knock in the past two years, as she reveals in a new documentary filmed to mark her comeback. 'Sometimes it can get kind of lonely because you don't open the gate up that much,' she confides.

'You're guarded, you have to be that way. So I'm kind of stuck in this place and it's like: "How do you deal [with it]?" And you just cope. And that's what I do. I just cope with it. Every day.'

Meanwhile, her 27th birthday provides the ideal publicity for the release of her latest album, Circus, which was specifically timed to coincide with the date.

'This is going to be the album which cements her legend status,' says Larry Rudolph optimistically, piling yet more pressure on his over-worked charge.

For Britney, the silver lining to this cloud of despondency is that it keeps her out of the Los Angeles home which has become her prison - and a constant reminder of the fact that her little boys are growing up without her.

Nevertheless, she has made no secret of her desire to escape from it all and return to a normal life, stating that in five years' time she would like to be happily remarried and settled down with her children.

When he took control of her life earlier this year, Jamie Spears said he hoped his guardianship would run until the end of 2008, whereupon they would 'sit back and evaluate where we are at the time, where Britney is at that time'.

As she gazes mournfully out of her gilded cage, no doubt Britney is counting the days until she is allowed a measure of freedom.

Having lived her entire life under the control of others, however, one cannot help but wonder whether she will be able to cope if that day ever comes.

Source and Pictures: Dailt Mail