The new book dissecting Martin Bashir’s deceptions and forgeries behind Diana’s famous Panorama interview, and how the BBC suppressed disclosure of Bashir’s manipulations and lies
I spent two straight days last week gripped by DIANARAMA, British journalist Andy Webb’s new book about BBC reporter Martin Bashir’s deceptions that lured Diana, The Princess of Wales into an infamous televised interview broadcast in Britain on November 20, 1995. Diana’s revelations about her adultery, the Prince of Wales’s affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, and her doubts about her husband’s fitness to be king rocked the royal family and ended her marriage to Prince Charles.
This is a subject that has deeply interested me since I immersed myself in Diana’s life and her death in 1997 for my book, Diana In Search Of Herself: Portrait of a Troubled Princess, published by Random House in 1999. I also have a particular stake in the story.
“I did buy into it”
For twenty-five years the full explanation for Diana’s decision to choose Bashir, a little-known reporter at the BBC, lay buried. It involved Bashir’s skillful manipulations in a series of meetings in 1995 to persuade Diana’s brother Charles, the 9th Earl Spencer, to introduce him to the princess. “I did buy into it to start with,” Spencer later told me. But after his meeting with Bashir and Diana, he was skeptical, and he believed his sister shared his view. Unbeknownst to her brother, Diana trusted Bashir and gave him his blockbuster scoop.
Martin Bashir interviewing Diana, The Princess of Wales on Panorama, November 20, 1995
Bashir’s massive double-cross and the BBC’s complicity were finally revealed in November 2020 with a string of exposes in the Daily Mail. The newspaper’s series had been preceded by a damning documentary produced by Andy Webb to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Panorama interview. After remaining publicly silent for all those years, Charles Spencer had shared with Webb and the Daily Mail the notes from his encounters with Bashir that prompted him to introduce the BBC newsman to Diana on September 19, 1995. Those notes detailed sensational allegations by Bashir about how close advisers to Diana and Prince Charles, members of the royal family, and even Diana’s friends were engaging in misbehavior and spreading gossip to undermine her. Bashir’s claims turned out to be fabrications, but at the time, coming from the vaunted BBC, they seemed persuasive.
He waived anonymity
On November 18, 2020, the BBC responded to the newspaper and television revelations about Bashir by announcing an inquiry headed by a veteran judge, Lord Dyson. It occurred to me that I had something to offer the judge and his team. When I was reporting my Diana book, I conducted a confidential interview with Charles Spencer on May 22, 1998 that contained some startling disclosures about Bashir’s behavior—all of which buttressed what Spencer had shared from his own files for the Daily Mail series in November 2020. I emailed Charles the following month, and he waived anonymity so I could give the Dyson investigators the pertinent passages from the transcript of our interview. The ultimate report published on May 20, 2021 includes a partly redacted version of that interview in its appendices and refers to it briefly in the report’s text.
Charles, the 9th Earl Spencer, speaking about the Dyson Report after its publication on May 20, 2021
The Dyson Report rightly condemns Bashir for his misdeeds. But Webb’s book drills down on the report’s failure to ask the BBC leaders hard questions about their conduct. They knew in early 1996 that Bashir had deceived Diana’s brother with forged documents, yet they made no effort to alert him. It is reasonable to assume that Diana might be alive today had she known then what was revealed a quarter century later.
I have nothing to add to Webb’s analysis, but I found within my files more new information from Charles Spencer about Bashir’s behavior in the summer and autumn of 1995. He also described Diana’s state of mind when Bashir approached her and explained why he decided to step away after making the introduction. I unearthed interviews from several others as well who shed light on Diana’s words and actions before and after Panorama, and her naivete in picking Martin Bashir as her possible collaborator on a book deal that fell apart.
I’ll write about all this in two Royals Extras. Part I will focus on Charles Spencer’s unwitting role in Bashir’s scheme to entrap Diana.