Three decades after its broadcast, a new book revisits the infamous BBC interview, examining Martin Bashir’s deception of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the subsequent BBC response.
“Dianarama,” penned by Andy Webb, re-examines the Panorama interview where the late princess famously declared “there were three of us” in her marriage to Prince Charles, now the King.
Bashir, then a Panorama reporter, secured the 1995 interview after presenting Diana’s brother with fabricated bank statements suggesting individuals close to her were being paid by MI5.
The book alleges that Earl Spencer, Diana’s brother, initially refrained from criticizing Bashir, wary of casting doubt on Diana’s decision to grant the interview.
“To come out as a strong critic of Bashir would have been in effect to paint his sister as a gullible fool,” Webb writes. “Far better to say nothing than to open a family rift.”
The book reveals Earl Spencer publicly voiced his concerns in 2020, coinciding with Webb’s Channel 4 documentary about the interview.
Webb obtained BBC documents through freedom of information requests regarding then-director of BBC News Tony Hall’s report to the BBC’s governors.
These documents suggested Earl Spencer had shown the bank statements to Bashir, rather than the other way around.
Subsequently, the earl made an irate 40-minute phone call to Webb on the morning of the Channel 4 documentary’s broadcast, detailing for the first time how Bashir had provided him with the statements and other outlandish allegations.
Webb writes that, hours before broadcast, he decided, based on “little more than a gut feeling,” that the BBC had been lying and Earl Spencer had been truthful.
According to the publisher’s press release, the book was written with “full support from Charles Spencer.”
Beyond the fake bank statements, the book underscores a series of lurid and false claims Bashir made to Earl Spencer about the Royal Family, including the then Prince Charles.
Webb describes Bashir as “pathologically, compellingly charming. Ruthless.”
Following the interview, Bashir worked for ITV and US broadcasters. He returned to the BBC as religion editor in 2016, resigning in 2021 due to ill health, shortly before the release of a scathing report by former Supreme Court Justice Lord Dyson.
Lord Dyson’s 2021 report deemed Lord Hall, who later became director general of the BBC, to have conducted a “woeful and ineffective” investigation into Bashir.
Webb suggests that if the full truth had been disclosed to the BBC governors in 1996, the “consequences for Diana can only be guessed at.”
A BBC spokesperson said the corporation had accepted Lord Dyson’s findings in full and publicly apologised for its part in the report’s conclusions.
Lord Hall told BBC News he had nothing to add to his apology after the Dyson report, in which he acknowledged that the BBC investigation into Bashir in 1996 “failed to meet the standards that were required”.
There was no response to BBC News’s approach to Martin Bashir’s representative.
The book also suggests that the Prince of Wales is “taking steps to discover” the truth about Martin Bashir’s interview.
Prince William strongly criticised BBC managers after Lord Dyson’s report, saying they “looked the other way, rather than asking tough questions.”
He stated the interview significantly worsened his parents’ relationship and contributed to her fear, paranoia, and isolation before her death.
The book includes a warning to the BBC from an unnamed source who describes William as an “implacable antagonist” who “has people on the case.” Kensington Palace has declined to comment on the book.
Matt Wiessler, the freelance designer who created the forged bank statements at Bashir’s request, has since received compensation and an apology from the BBC after being banned from working for the corporation in 1996.
The book reveals the personal guilt he felt after Princess Diana’s death in 1997, leading him to join the mourning crowds at Buckingham Palace.
“I was standing right by the gate at 4am because I felt very strongly that I did have a hand in it,” Wiessler says.
While a burglary at Wiessler’s flat, targeting the floppy disks containing his forgeries, has been previously reported, the book reveals a thief left what the designer described as “[excrement] down my loo” for him to find.
Webb’s investigation began after viewing the 2006 play “Frost/Nixon,” about the interviews between David Frost and Richard Nixon.
Inspired to create a documentary about the Panorama interview, he discovered the story of the deception already in two books: a history of the Panorama program and one of Andrew Morton’s biographies of Diana.
The book also reveals that, while working on his documentary, he investigated the employer of his wife, Diana Martin, then the deputy editor of Panorama.
Ms. Martin’s father, Christopher, had produced the 1994 ITV documentary with Jonathan Dimbleby in which Prince Charles confessed to adultery.
Without that programme, Andy Webb asserts, Princess Diana likely would not have agreed to the interview with Bashir.
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