{"id":602808,"date":"2025-11-30T06:24:25","date_gmt":"2025-11-30T06:24:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/602808\/"},"modified":"2025-11-30T06:24:25","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T06:24:25","slug":"behind-the-new-book-that-shames-the-bbc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/602808\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind the New Book That Shames the BBC"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The new book dissecting Martin Bashir\u2019s deceptions and forgeries behind Diana\u2019s famous Panorama interview, and how the BBC suppressed disclosure of Bashir\u2019s manipulations and lies<\/p>\n

I spent two straight days last week gripped by DIANARAMA, British journalist Andy Webb\u2019s new book about BBC reporter Martin Bashir\u2019s deceptions that lured Diana, The Princess of Wales into an infamous televised interview broadcast in Britain on November 20, 1995. Diana\u2019s revelations about her adultery, the Prince of Wales\u2019s affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, and her doubts about her husband\u2019s fitness to be king rocked the royal family and ended her marriage to Prince Charles.<\/p>\n

This is a subject that has deeply interested me since I immersed myself in Diana\u2019s life and her death in 1997 for my book, Diana In Search Of Herself: Portrait of a Troubled Princess<\/a>, published by Random House in 1999. I also have a particular stake in the story.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did buy into it\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

For twenty-five years the full explanation for Diana\u2019s decision to choose Bashir, a little-known reporter at the BBC, lay buried. It involved Bashir\u2019s skillful manipulations in a series of meetings in 1995 to persuade Diana\u2019s brother Charles, the 9th Earl Spencer, to introduce him to the princess. \u201cI did buy into it to start with,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Martin Bashir interviewing Diana, The Princess of Wales on Panorama, November 20, 1995<\/p>\n

Bashir\u2019s massive double-cross and the BBC\u2019s complicity were finally revealed in November 2020 with a string of exposes in the Daily Mail. The newspaper\u2019s 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\u2019s friends were engaging in misbehavior and spreading gossip to undermine her. Bashir\u2019s claims turned out to be fabrications, but at the time, coming from the vaunted BBC, they seemed persuasive.<\/p>\n

He waived anonymity<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s behavior\u2014all 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\u2019s text.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Charles, the 9th Earl Spencer, speaking about the Dyson Report after its publication on May 20, 2021<\/p>\n

The Dyson Report rightly condemns Bashir for his misdeeds. But Webb\u2019s book drills down on the report\u2019s failure to ask the BBC leaders hard questions about their conduct. They knew in early 1996 that Bashir had deceived Diana\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Share<\/a><\/p>\n

I have nothing to add to Webb\u2019s analysis, but I found within my files more new information from Charles Spencer about Bashir\u2019s behavior in the summer and autumn of 1995. He also described Diana\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll write about all this in two Royals Extras. Part I will focus on Charles Spencer\u2019s unwitting role in Bashir\u2019s scheme to entrap Diana.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The new book dissecting Martin Bashir\u2019s deceptions and forgeries behind Diana\u2019s famous Panorama interview, and how the BBC…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":602809,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7708],"tags":[5105,7710,519,448],"class_list":{"0":"post-602808","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-royals","8":"tag-royal","9":"tag-royal-families","10":"tag-royal-family","11":"tag-royals"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115637221738695810","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=602808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602808\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/602809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=602808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=602808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=602808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}