The Diana interview: fraud at the BBC
“If it happened today, we’d call it gaslighting,” said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian – manipulating a vulnerable person by playing on their “darkest suspicions”. Twenty-five years ago, Martin Bashir, a young reporter for BBC’s Panorama, secured a bombshell interview with Princess Diana, in which the most famous woman on the planet admitted in front of 23 million viewers that her marriage was over. “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded,” she said, referring to Prince Charles’s affair with Camilla Parker Bowles. It was a career-making scoop, but it seems Bashir won the interview by subterfuge. He’d been introduced to her by her brother, Earl Spencer, after showing him fake bank statements supposedly “proving” that Diana’s aides were being paid to spy on her by the press. At a time when she was “emotionally fragile” and rather paranoid, these “revelations” helped Bashir win her trust.
The BBC man “poisoned” the princess’s mind “with concocted tales of nefarious plots”, said Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail. Quoting “intelligence sources”, Bashir even claimed that her son, Prince William, had a watch that was secretly recording their conversations. In fact, the BBC did carry out a “perfunctory” inquiry into Bashir’s methods soon after the interview was aired. Partly conducted by Tony Hall, later the BBC’s Director-General, it exonerated Bashir, concluding that he simply “wasn’t thinking” when he commissioned a graphic designer to manufacture the phoney statements. The hapless graphic designer, by contrast, never worked for the BBC again. It looks like a classic cover-up.
This affair “has begun to assume ominous proportions for the BBC”, said Robin Aitken in The Daily Telegraph. Two documentaries marking the anniversary of the interview have raked over the embers, and Spencer has presented detailed evidence which he says shows the extent of the fraud. The BBC has launched another inquiry – though Bashir, now its religion editor, is said to be too ill to give evidence, following heart surgery and Covid-19. Well, we must all hope that Bashir recovers soon, said Libby Purves in The Times – and that the new investigation is rather more “rigorous”.