The BBC’S Bashirgate lies were unwittingly revealed in its own evidence to Dyson investigation
A cover-up has endured for two decades but the corporation must realise it is time to come clean
The BBC really has been trying hard to kid us over Bashirgate. Does anyone seriously believe that in the scandal over the Diana, Princess of Wales interview, that the BBC management gave this inexperienced reporter a BBC chequebook, a pat on the back and sent him off on his own to undertake the most sensitive and delicate story it has ever conducted, and then left him to his own devices until he delivered?
Could anyone imagine that Britain’s most successful investigative programme does not have complete management and control and a long and fully established procedure for the most rigorous checks and double checks and editorial firewalls to prevent corrupt reporters’ material from ever reaching the screen?
No, of course not. But you wouldn’t know it from the BBC’S myriad statements or the independent report into the affair by Lord Dyson.
Let me remove just some of the wool from a few eyes. In doing so, I have the dispiriting task of also lifting just some of the opprobrium off the shoulders of the dreadful Bashir and placing it on the shoulders of the BBC’S invisible man.
You should know there are more editorial firewalls between freelance reporters and transmission on Panorama than there are safety catches on an inter-continental ballistic missile. So how come the entire system went into meltdown and failed ?
The BBC has consistently and duplicitously had us believe it was a reporter failure alone, that Bashir went rogue and fooled us all.
Don’t buy it. Blaming Bashir alone for the biggest scandal in BBC history is like blaming the cabin steward for the fatal crash of an aircraft.
Did Bashir have a boss ? Of course he did. Was his boss responsible for Bashir’s behaviour and output ? Of course he was. Who was he ? The BBC has never really admitted this, preferring to heap all the responsibility for the disaster on Bashir. But the truth is his limited editorial powers ended the moment he submitted his material to the invisible man, his immediate supervisor/manager/producer/editor.
It has consistently suited the BBC’S defence to hide the invisible man and obscure his full responsibility for Bashir’s product. So let me shine a light on this spectral figure and drag him out of the BBC closet.
He was Steve Hewlett, the editor of Panorama and self-appointed producer and editor of the entire Diana project. It was his operation. He deserved all the bouquets and all the brickbats that followed. The BBC however, in a desperate attempt to save the reputation of its entire senior current affairs control system, men of high rank and high pay, chose to infer Bashir was in charge of himself.
Steve was my boss too. A large, overweight, tough operator who took no prisoners and was incapable of being fooled. The editor needs all that and a large whip just to keep control of the talented, egotistical journalists who work on Panorama.
The very idea that a minor hack such as Bashir could run rings around Hewlett is too absurd to contemplate.
As a small time contract reporter, albeit with high hopes and a big idea, Bashir, like every other reporter before him, up to and including David Dimbleby, was always under the direct control of first his producer and then his editor. As it happens both responsibilities were fused by Hewlett – hence not someone the BBC could ever dare even hint might have failed in his duties. The editor of Panorama at that time (no longer) was one of the ten most powerful journalists in Britain.
So, as the scandal broke, the BBC came up with a fast and effective operation to cover up its failings, propel Bashir to the front and allow him to face the storm even though he had no editorial responsibility for what was transmitted.
What should have happened, is that Hewlett should have sussed Bashir from the off, shortened his editorial leash even further, and demanded cast iron proof of the legitimacy of everything he did to acquire the Princess’s co-operation. In that sense alone, Bashir does not deserve all of the odium heaped upon him. When his methods were exposed he should simply have been quietly sacked on the spot by Hewlett, who in turn should have faced the consequences. But the contrary happened: Bashir had to be saved to protect Hewlett. And to save Bashir the BBC needed scapegoats.
In my more than two decades on Panorama I made more than 120 programmes, none of them without the close, direct supervision of my producer who was always my boss, just as the editor was my producer’s boss. To prevent corrupt reporting, the entire editorial process was designed around a simple pyramid of editorial responsibility, beginning with the producer and ending with the Director-general, the head of all BBC journalism.
As this crucial BBC procedure has never been fully or publicly explained by the BBC, it has allowed the broadcaster to maintain the fiction of reporter responsibility in order to hide and cover up the deceit needed to protect its editorial safety procedure, which in the case of the Princess Diana interview, simply imploded.
Hewlett, who died in 2017, was one of my favourite editors. But death does not bestow innocence on anyone. Nothing now should absolve the BBC from its attempts protect itself.
The new Director-general, Tim Davie, has personally apologised to me (and a handful of others) for the cover-up and its effect on my own reputation internally.
But his commissioning of the Supreme Court Judge Lord Dyson to conduct an independent investigation was not an unalloyed success. Dyson never quite understood how Panorama actually made films. He was unable to compel witnesses to give evidence, and no one was asked to testify on oath. His well-intentioned but soggy report perpetuated the BBC myth that Bashir effectively worked on his own.
Although as a Dyson witness, I pestered the judge to understand the huge significance of the power of the producer and the editor, he chose to largely ignore this. “It is clear,” he wrote “…that Mr Bashir did not have a programme producer (which) is why Mr Hewlett himself was supervising Mr Bashir in so far as anyone was performing that role.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Of course Bashir had a producer. It was no less than the programme editor himself, and Hewlett did much more than merely supervise. He held full editorial responsibility.
Dyson added: “I am not persuaded that better supervision would have prevented Mr Bashir’s successful deception.” Oh really? In other words, the BBC, says Dyson, has no defence against determined gangster-reporters like Bashir.
Dyson also missed the significance of the payment of £250 by Panorama for the forged bank statement graphics used by Bashir to con Earl Spencer into helping him acquire the interview.
I’ve tackled half a dozen former Panorama editors and none can remember a reporter being allowed to commission graphics of his own design, let alone authorise payment for them. Indeed no Panorama reporter ever has a budget – it is controlled by his producer. Bashir should not have been allowed to spend a penny without Hewlett’s specific clearance. And if Hewlett did his job and cleared that infamous graphic what on earth did he think it was created for ?
Dyson does, unwittingly, reveal in his report how the BBC cover-up was born and who was responsible for it.
He states that as rumours of the forged graphic spread round the office, I and two colleagues immediately went to warn Hewlett of the gossip. (He famously responded by telling us it was none of our ‘f---ing business’.)
But within minutes of our leaving his office, Dyson reports, Hewlett instantly conceived a cover-up plan to protect Bashir.
Next door to Hewlett’s office, Clive Edwards, the programme’s deputy editor heard the raised voices and asked Hewlett what had been going on. Hewlett, Dyson reports, was furious and complained that the three of us “were jealous and were trying undermine the Diana programme”. Arrant nonsense.
And so the great lie was born. In one sentence Bashir was transformed into an innocent victim of jealous colleagues trouble makers, and leakers to the press (my two colleagues).
To inflate and give extra credence to this, Panorama was deemed by several editorial managers to be infected by “cultural problems” (BBC code for jealous colleagues, trouble makers and press leakers). Dyson allowed that extra lie to take root in his report without any apparent attempt at verification.
I was on Panorama throughout the whole affair. Trust me, we were all, to a man, over the moon at Bashir’s triumphant “scoop” and I heard not one word of jealousy. The only leaker took some six months before, in desperation to make some money, they did go to the press.
Dyson does, however, almost accidentally, uncover the heart of the BBC’S cover-up. He reveals that this great British institution would lie.
Someone ordered its press office to lie to the world’s press about the Bashir affair: to make this work it would need to use its press office to vilify innocent journalists. In her evidence, Alison Kelly, our press officer, disclosed that she had been instructed that the BBC was briefing the press that it suspected that stories about fake bank statements were being leaked by jealous colleagues. In other words, Hewlett’s lie was to be formalised and fed to an unwitting national press.
Kelly told Dyson she was told to warn the Panorama staff about this: “I do recall a certain amount of hostility…”. Then she added : “It wouldn’t have been Steve Hewlett’s style. I don’t know who did it, but I do remember doing it and I remember it being quite awful.”
Lord Hall, then head of news and current affairs, again pleaded headaches and told Dyson he knew nothing about this shocking abuse of truth but swore he would never have countenanced such a shameful campaign. So the decision to deceive Britain’s press was taken at a relatively low level. Who had motive? Who had the authority?
The result was a dozen or so national newspapers publishing the BBC lies. I have the clips.
Even during the ludicrous BBC in-house “investigation” into Bashir’s behaviour by two of his bosses, not only was Earl Spencer not invited to attend, but neither was Hewlett, who must have known about his reporters’ near-criminal behaviour.
The “investigation” ended with Bashir breaking down in tears and being rewarded with a get-out-of-jailfree card by his two totally bamboozled and sympathetic questioners.
The cover-up has endured for two decades and would have been written into the corporation’s history had Earl Spencer not spoken out two years ago. Yet the BBC’S loss of memory, evasions, dissembling and cover-ups, continue.
The one key internal memorandum (written by Tim Gardam, the only editorial manager to emerge from the scandal with credit) that confirmed Bashir is a liar has gone missing from the BBC archives. (Fortunately Gardam kept his own copy).
Despite Freedom of Information requests and the BBC’S own assurances that it has nothing to hide, not a single internal document sent to or from Steve Hewlett has been published. This bewildering absence raises the possibility that these files:
1. Have been taken without authority from the BBC Archives. In other words stolen by a well-motivated thief who had access.
2. The BBC has them but pretends it doesn’t because they are so damning.
3. The documents have never existed, in which case it must have been clear from the outset that there was a conspiracy to put absolutely nothing on paper, for reasons that seem pretty clear.
If anyone bothered to instruct Hewlett to write his 20,000-word report on the whole scandal, that seems to have gone walkies too.
The BBC remains a beacon of truth, so it is important to try to reveal the scale of rot that festered in it two decades ago. i fear there’s more to come. Come on my lovely Beeb. Let’s have it all out.
‘And so the great lie was born. Bashir was transformed into an innocent victim of jealous colleagues’
‘To make this work, the BBC would need to use its press office to vilify innocent journalists’