BBC finds Diana letter that ‘clears’ Bashir
As a new season of ‘The Crown’ begins, Camilla Tominey talks to Tina Brown, who had lunch with Diana not long before her death, and who reveals the princess had finally accepted Camilla was the love of her ex-husband’s life
THE BBC has recovered a letter handwritten by Diana, Princess of Wales, in which she insists she was not coerced by Martin Bashir i nto giving her landmark Panorama interview.
The letter, understood to have been found in BBC archives, will be handed to the independent inquiry into claims that Bashir forged documents in order to win the princess’s trust. The BBC has come under increasing pressure over the scandal, with MPS demanding an explanation for the use of fake bank statements as well as an alleged cover-up.
Executives were yesterday said to be “relieved” at the discovery and many are hopeful that it will absolve them of any blame. The BBC insists that the letter is genuine but a handwriting expert could be called in to confirm that it was written in the princess’s hand. The note had not been seen since 1996, when Bashir was first accused of forging bank statements in order to clinch the interview, in which the princess declared: “There were three of us in this marriage.”
Lord Hall of Birkenhead, the corporation’s former director-general, conducted an internal investigation into the allegations. But as soon as the letter was received, the probe was abandoned, as it was deemed appropriate evidence that the princess had not been misled. There was a communal “sigh of relief ”, one executive said. “We could all relax for Christmas. We had had a scare but had got through it.” But, incredibly, despite its significance, the letter was mislaid. Mystery surrounded its whereabouts, fuelling speculation about its very existence.
A BBC spokesman said yesterday: “The BBC has now recovered the princess’s original handwritten note which is referred to in our records from the time. We will pass it on to the independent investigation. We believe this is the original note passed to the BBC at the time.”
Bashir is said to have commissioned two forged bank statements, which he showed to the princess’s brother, Earl Spencer. The statements suggested that a former member of staff had betrayed him and was acting as a paid informant.
The information so impressed Earl Spencer that he orchestrated a meeting between the reporter and his sister.
The BBC has insisted that the princess never saw the forged statements and that they had no bearing on the interview. It has promised a “robust” independent inquiry, with which Bashir is expected to cooperate, despite being in recovery from a quadruple heart bypass.
Bashir is said to have been texting BBC colleagues to apologise for the “embarrassment” he has caused, branding it “a tragic way to retire”.
Cross- party MPS on the digital, culture, media and sport select committee will meet next week to consider whether to launch a parallel, parliamentary inquiry.
When a statuesque blonde in a mint green Chanel suit sashayed through New York’s Four Seasons Restaurant in the summer of 1997, fellow diners were reduced to stunned silence.
Tanned and with the Barbarellaesque looks of a supermodel, there was no mistaking Diana, Princess of Wales, who was meeting Tina Brown, then the editor of The New Yorker, and Anna Wintour, the editor-inchief of Vogue.
As three of the most formidable women of their era chatted intimately about the newly divorced princess’s future prospects as a global power player, none of them could ever have foreseen that little over a month later, Diana would be dead.
Brown, 66, who went on to write The Diana Chronicles, the definitive biography of one of the 20th century’s most complex characters, still remembers the conversation as if it was yesterday.
The contents are surprisingly at odds with the impression left not only by the princess’s controversial Panorama interview, but also her somewhat mawkish portrayal in the latest instalment of The Crown.
At 36, the Diana whom Brown met that July day was far from the paranoid and bitter figure depicted in recent coverage of Martin Bashir’s controversial handling of the explosive BBC interview. Nor was she the emotionally fragile thing that we encounter in the fourth series of the Netflix drama.
According to Brown, not only had Diana reconciled with Prince Charles, but she had even “accepted” Camilla Parker Bowles, whom she had called the third person in her marriage.
“At the end of Diana’s life, she and Charles were on the best terms they’d been for a very long time,” Brown insists. “Charles got into the habit of dropping in on her at Kensington Palace and they would have tea and a sort of rueful exchange.
“They even had some laughs together. It was definitely calming down, the boys were older. They talked about their philanthropies. And she had accepted Camilla.
“One thing she had finally done was really understand that Camilla was the love of his life, and there was just nothing she could do about it.
“But she said to me at that lunch that she would go back to Charles in a heartbeat if he wanted her.”
It seems an astonishing revelation in light of the acrimony of the War of the Waleses, which saw the former couple locked in a bitter briefing battle in the Nineties.
Brown points out: “Diana was desperately lonely. She still wished that her marriage could have survived. She didn’t say, ‘I’m so happy to be divorced’, she said, ‘I think we would have made a great team.’”
It cannot have helped that thanks to what Brown describes as Diana’s “disastrous taste in men”, she had not managed to make a success of any later relationship, scaring off the likes of heart surgeon Hasnat Khan with her “possessive” behaviour.
She embarked on an affair with Brown’s millionaire friend Teddy Forstmann, who described her as “the loneliest person he’d ever met”.
“She’d call him over Christmas Day, at times when everybody else was doing things and she would tell him how lonely she was,” says Brown. “Like everybody she got involved with, he found her just terribly demanding and needy and no one could assuage that need.”
Even those who didn’t mind the press intrusion, like Dodi Fayed, couldn’t protect her because they were publicity hounds who “were tipping off the papers” says Brown.
Speaking for the first time following the recent death of her husband of 39 years, Harold Evans, the former editor of The Sunday Times, Brown admits: “It’s been a pretty rough month or two but I’ve tried to move forward and try to do my work.” She reveals she is writing a second instalment of her Diana Chronicles, called The Palace Papers, chronicling events after the princess’s death.
There was certainly no denying Diana’s determination to make a difference when she met Brown for lunch. Not unlike the Duke and Duchess of Sussex now, she confided that she planned to make documentaries about ut the causes closest to her heart and had discussed with Tony Blair the idea dea of taking on an ambassadorial role le for the UK.
“She was a woman n very much on the cusp of trying to reinvent herself in a serious way,” says Brown. “She was a child hild when she got married but at this his point she knew what she wanted. ted. What she realised was that, with th her celebrity, she could actually be e a seriously impactful person.”
Brown says, however, ver, that Diana was a little “delusional” about what she could achieve. “She She said at one point that t she thought she could be e helpful in solving the
Irish peace process. I thought, ‘She’s really got the goddess complex.’ But her heart really was in her desire to be the kind of female Nelson Mandela in the world.” Diana’s complicated psychology has long fascinated royal watchers and Brown puts her allure down to her “amazing mixture of utter childishness but also incredibly self-possessed natural star quality exhibitionism”. Pointing out tha that Diana was “practically only a child” when she married Charles, aged 19 in 1981 and immediately assu assumed “Britney Spears” levels of fame, Brown says: “How many youn young rock stars survive being that famou famous? Most of them take overdoses. She w was in that category immediately of a superstar without the carapace of PR protection.
“So she’s dealin dealing with the Royal family, she’s dealing dealin with celebrity and she’s also a ve very young mother. Plus all of it was made imposs impossible by the fact Charl Charles wasn’t in love with her.”
Br Brown believes Diana’s “extr “extremely unhappy” child childhood, coupled with Char Charles’s rejection, “left the psychological wound that destroyed her life”.
Diana’s mother Frances lost custody of her children following her divorce from her father, Earl Spencer.
And when he remarried Raine, Countess of Dartmouth, he didn’t bother telling Diana, her older two sisters and brother – leaving them to find out about it in the newspapers instead.
“Diana wasn’t really parented in any sense that would give her role models of behaviour,” reflects Brown. “She was both spoilt and neglected, the worst possible combination for character building.”
Desperate for the love she missed out on as a child, she was the last to know, as she walked down the aisle at St Paul’s Cathedral in her billowing ivory taffeta wedding dress, that she was entering “an arranged marriage”.
“She had this pathological terror of being left because of her mother,” says Brown.
“One of the great appeals of marrying Charles was she thought there was no likelihood that he would ever leave her. He was forever, for keeps, happily ever after. So, when that turned out to be a fantasy, that really destabilised her.”
Ironically for a woman who felt
‘They even had some laughs together. It was calming down, the boys were older’
‘Having the public love you, when your husband doesn’t, is a panacea’
“hounded” by the media, celebrity proved to be her salvation. “The Crown, which I think is absolutely superb, does miss one characteristic that Diana always had, which was guile. Diana was all guile.”
Reflecting on how gutsy it was for the princess to dance with Wayne Sleep to Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl at the Royal Opera House in 1985, Brown asks: “Can you honestly imagine Kate doing that, or even Meghan? She had a mixture of understanding that she had a unique star power and natural magnetism which was something that evolved. She came to love that.
“She did enjoy her fame more than people think, actually. Having the public love you, when your husband doesn’t, it’s something of a panacea. The more he spurned her, the more she sought public approbation.”
Far from the princess being a constant victim of the press, Brown, who became editor of Vanity Fair at the age of 25, insists Diana “knew how to play them brilliantly”.
Her upstaging of Charles naturally angered a man who had grown used to being centre of attention as the heir to the throne.
“I found her very, very impressive,” admits Brown. “For a start she was fantastically more beautiful in person than she ever was in her pictures. One of the things you don’t really get from pictures is just how tall she was. She was ravishing.”
She was also the perfect princess for a brave new world. “That era was on the cusp of the old and the new,” recalls Brown. “After Diana, it never became important again that the girl that the prince would marry would have to be a virgin. They were just at the end of that terribly antiquated view.”
Perhaps the biggest tragedy of all is that the Palace never quite appreciated Diana’s value as the jewel in the crown.