BBC spent £150k to keep Bashir-diana documents secret in battle with film-maker

THE BBC has spent more than £150,000 trying to keep secret a cache of documents relating to an alleged cover-up of the Diana, Princess of Wales Panorama controversy.

The corporation has been ordered to release internal emails under freedom of information laws that may shed light on senior executives’ behaviour when they discovered that Martin Bashir had used forged documents to help secure his interview with the Princess in 1995.

For the past two and a half years, the BBC has fought attempts by the journalist and film-maker Andrew Webb to access the material, and in doing so it has racked up a bill of £151,830 on external legal advice alone. It has spent another £13,556 on computer services for “document storage and handling”. The total of £165,386 does not include the cost of internal lawyers and other employees, which the BBC says is impossible to quantify.

Jason Pobjoy, a media law specialist who has also represented the Duke of Sussex, has represented the BBC at several court hearings. The BBC’S spending on external legal advice in its fight with Mr Webb equates to 955 licence fees.

The corporation is expected to hand over about 10,000 pages of data to Mr Webb today after being ordered by a judge to do so in a hearing in December.

It was originally given a deadline of last Friday but asked for a last-minute extension after saying it had not had time to process all of the data.

Mr Webb believes the BBC deliber- ately covered up the Bashir scandal not only in 1995, when it first learnt that he had forged documents, but also in 2020 when Mr Webb made a documentary about Bashir’s behaviour in securing the interview.

In 2021, Lord Dyson, the former Supreme Court justice, published a report into the Bashir scandal in which he said the BBC had covered up what it knew about Bashir’s behaviour in the 1990s. Mr Webb is trying to ascertain who decided in 2020, when he made his documentary, to withhold a key document – later given to Lord Dyson – that set out how the original cover-up happened. Mr Webb believes senior managers who may still be working at the BBC might be implicated.