PANORAMA TO PROBE BASHIR-DI INTERVIEW
BBC show ‘will leave no stone unturned’
PANORAMA is to investigate itself in a special programme looking into how Martin Bashir secured his historic interview with Princess Diana.
The BBC has commissioned one of its most experienced journalists, John Ware, to make the show – and he has been told to leave “no stone unturned”.
Bosses hope the programme would go some way to showing their inquiries have been thorough.
The decision shows the levels of concern at the BBC over the allegations of forgery, deception and cover-up that have emerged in relation to the 1995 interview.
It also suggests there are doubts at the highest level that the official probe launched by BBC director-general Tim Davie and headed by retired Supreme Court judge Lord Dyson will go far enough.
Last month Diana’s brother Earl Spencer accused the John Ware
BBC of a “whitewash” in its initial inquiry and called for a full investigation.
It was 25 years last month that Bashir obtained the groundbreaking interview with the Princess, in which she dramatically revealed that there were “three people in my marriage”, in a pointed reference to Charles’s relationship with his now-wife Camilla.
Last night Mr Ware, who worked on Panorama between 1986 and 2012, declined to comment.
It is not the first time he has been asked to investigate another branch of the BBC. Back in 2004, he examined the Today programme’s report into the death of Dr David Kelly.
His award- winning Panorama programme A Fight To The Death exposed poor conduct by the BBC and led to the Hutton Inquiry.
Mr Bashir, who later became the corporation’s religion editor, is not currently working after contracting coronavirus and undergoing a quadruple heart bypass operation.