They won’t remind us, but the tabloids hurt Diana just as much as Panorama did
“It brings indescribable sadness,” ran Prince William’s statement on the damning report into Panorama’s interview with his mother, “to know that the BBC’s failures contributed significantly to her fear, paranoia and isolation that I remember from those final years with her.”
“Paranoia” – what a word to take you back. When Martin Bashir’s Diana interview aired in 1995, the MP (and friend of Prince Charles) Nicholas Soames was roundly attacked for describing Diana as in “the advanced stages of paranoia” and in the grip of “mental illness”. It’s fair to say his verdict didn’t come from a place of total support. Soames has since expressed regret for it, adding that he wasn’t a doctor. Now Diana’s elder son uses the same word – with few these days disagreeing how cruelly she was driven to it – while her younger son absolutely refuses to draw some comforting veil over her state of mental health.
The conclusions of the Dyson report are a shameful stain on the BBC, deeply compounded by coming 26 years after the offence, by way of cover-upand whitewash. How completely stunning that former director general Tony Hall judged Bashir “an honest and honourable man”, when anything more than cursory scrutiny marked him out so clearly – and I’m not a doctor – as a complete wrong ’un. It feels particularly gracious that Prince Harry’s own statement tacitly acknowledged the BBC for “taking some form of accountability” and “owning it”.
And so to people yet to take ownership of their own actions. I think we can live without today’s preposterous moralising from much of Fleet Street, who know very well the terrible things they and others did on countless occasions to get stories relating to Diana or her wider family. “Defund the BBC,” was last night’s pontification from former Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie, who once put Diana’s covertly recorded private phone calls on a premium-rate line so readers could ring in and have a listen. And those were the good years. Half the stuff these guys did in pursuit of Diana stories is, mercifully for them, completely unprintable.
Alas, we will spend the next few days hearing of the BBC’s shame from some of the most shameless hypocrites in human history. The tabloids may not like Prince Harry’s reincarnation as a super-rich Californian wellness bore, but it does have the moral edge over pulling people’s medical records and hacking the phones of murdered 13year-old girls.
But of course, few have rewritten their own history more than Fleet Street’s Diana-watchers. The overnight timing of the Paris crash meant the early editions of the Sunday papers had already been printed and contained, as usual, large amounts of unfavourable stuff about whatever else