BBC admitted Bashir might have destroyed Diana evidence
Disappearance of shamed reporter’s key Panorama details ‘not ideal, but may realistically be the case’
MARTIN BASHIR may have destroyed evidence relating to his Panorama interview with the late Princess of Wales, the BBC admitted.
The corporation said the disgraced reporter could have either “destroyed or removed” documentation when he left to join ITV four years after the notorious broadcast in 1995.
By that stage, allegations of duplicity by Bashir were already circling surrounding the way he gained the Princess’s trust in order to secure the interview. In particular, that he ordered the forging of bank statements to make it look as if members of her staff were being paid by the media.
In 2014, a Freedom of Information request was made to the BBC to release all documentation relating to the 1995 Panorama edition.
The applicant complained to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) about the BBC’S response and the ICO subsequently published a “decision notice”.
The 2015 notice stated that the corporation had pleaded that it could not provide more documentation than it already had, partly because of Bashir’s actions.
“Some of the documentation may have belonged to and been destroyed or removed by Martin Bashir when he left the BBC, only a year or two after the event,” the report said. “Whilst not ideal, this may realistically be the case.”
The ICO report stated that, in total, the BBC could only provide a total of 10 documents in answer to an identical information request in 2006.
The fact that the Panorama interview was an exclusive was also given as a reason for such a slender paper trail.
“Paperwork would have been kept to a minimum, certainly before transmission,” it reports a BBC information manager as arguing. “Much of the communication would have been done deliberately by telephone or meeting, to avoid the need for documented records.”
The BBC also claimed that only a “very small group” had been involved in the making of the programme, and that the majority had since left, limiting the potential availability of records.
The Diana interview propelled the previously little-known reporter into stardom and, after a stint at rival ITV, he went on to enjoy a highly lucrative career in the United States.
Bashir has always maintained that the forged documents played no role in securing the interview with the late Princess, and has cited a handwritten note by her that appears to support this contention.
However, in 2021 the then Duke of Cambridge made an excoriating attack on the reporter’s conduct, saying his interview had “contributed significantly to her fear, paranoia and isolation” in the final years of her life.
‘Some documentation may have belonged to and been removed by Martin Bashir when he left the BBC’
Bashir returned to the BBC in 2016 as religious affairs correspondent, but resigned in 2021, the same year an independent inquiry by Lord Dyson concluded that he had been “unreliable”, “devious” and “dishonest”. A friend of Bashir’s told The Telegraph that the reporter said “he did not destroy any documents and indeed provided the Dyson inquiry with everything in his possession”. Bashir has been approached for comment.
BBC lawyers made light of the scandal surrounding Bashir’s use of forged documents to secure his 1995 Panorama interview, joking they would be condemned to “a short stretch in the Tower”. Internal emails, released via a Freedom of Information request, reveal that staff quipped they were unlikely to be awarded knighthoods, with the only honours they might be due being for “services to heritage and inappropriate revelation”.
The messages were sent in September 2020, in the run-up to the 25th anniversary of the broadcast.