Not a hope basically. £400 should get you a nice little Centrino effort if you look around, but not much hope of using with DBP. There is a 1.4Ghz Centrino in my house (not mine) that uses internal Intel Extreme graphics (spit). No chance with any games made after 2001 (inc. DBP). Not bad with simple stuff though. And if by "developing in DBP" you mean "Chess" rather than "Doom 3", then fine. Otherwise no.
A while ago I picked up a nice Dell 8600 (1920x1200 screen - Mmmmmm) from the Dell outlet for a very decent price (about £900 for a system worth twice as much at the time). Still plays Doom 3 without any issues, and DBP is great on it. But notice that even at half the price it was still £900.
Oh, and with Centrinos then times the CPU by 1.5 to get a better idea. My Dell is a 2Ghz centrino. So basically equivelent to about a 3Ghz P4. In games this more or less is true, and in one experiment with SuperPi (calculate million decimal places of Pi) not even a 3.6Ghz P4 laptop could touch it (only a fully loaded AMD64 which beat me by only one second).
http://www.whatlaptop.co.uk/Forums/Default.aspxThis site was great when I was researching which laptop to get. Has all the main sites, and reviews. Couldn't have done without it basically and is lower on the Fanboys than most sites. For instance it stopped me at the last minute from buying a fully loaded Alienware (for £2k) because (at the time) other companies are out there that use the exact same components (including chassis), but are decently faster (was rubbish memory at the time) and hundreds of pounds cheaper. With better reputations. Hmmm. Don't get alien eyes in the BIOS though eh?
Cheers
I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
