Diana’s lover savages Bashir
Princess’s ex breaks his silence to fillet BBC reporter over 1995 Panorama interview
PRINCESS Diana’s former l over Hasnat Khan has broken his silence to expose how the ‘cunning’ Martin Bashir preyed on her.
Mr Khan said the reporter ‘filled her head with rubbish’ until Prince William, then a teen, warned her: ‘Mummy, he’s not a good person.’
In an unprecedented interview, Mr Khan – the surgeon with whom Diana was infatuated– lifted the lid on the tactics Bashir deployed to l and his Panorama scoop.
And he revealed how – when the scandal over Bashir’s behaviour reached boiling point late last year – a close ally of the beleaguered BBC religion editor got in touch, begging for help.
Mr Khan came forward after the Mail exposed the methods used by Bashir to trick Diana into giving her bombshell 1995
‘Three of us in this marriage’
TV interview, which saw her declare: ‘There were three of us in this marriage.’
Her brother, Earl Spencer, alleges Bashir spun a web of deceit, claiming senior royals betrayed Diana to newspapers and MI5, to draw the vulnerable princess into his confidence.
Mr Khan, the Pakistani-born heart surgeon dubbed ‘ Mr Wonderful’ by Diana during their intense two- year relationship, was her boyfriend throughout the period in question.
He told the Mail that Bashir ‘ manipulated’ t he princess, adding: ‘He was a cunning man.’ He also revealed that:
▮ Diana admitted she had a ‘mole’ codenamed Dr Jarman – who turned out to be Bashir;
▮ Bashir’s bogus claims included that Camilla Parker Bowles went to the US for plastic surgery;
▮ Bashir peppered Mr Khan with intimate questions about marrying the princess;
▮ The surgeon warned Diana that Bashir was dangerous and she ‘should have nothing more to do with him’;
▮ Diana gave the explosive Panorama i nterview to f orce Prince Charles to divorce her;
▮ It was Prince William, then aged just 13, who finally convinced his mother to sever ties with Bashir.
Mr Khan, 62, said he was contacted by a mutual acquaintance of his and Bashir’s several weeks ago, after the reporter’s behaviour hit the headlines in the Mail.
Mr Khan said: ‘He phoned me, and said he knew Martin Bashir, and that he was under a lot of stress. He said he was a decent man but t hat he was very depressed and that he had a favour to ask: would I talk to Bashir? I think the idea was that I would say something about how Diana wanted to do the interview. I could not do that.’
Mr Khan’s romance with Diana began in 1995 – just a few weeks before the Panorama interview – and ran until the summer of 1997, ending shortly before the princess’s fatal car crash in August.
Mr Khan said: ‘One of her most attractive qualities was her vulnerability... I later realised that Martin picked on those vulnerabilities and exploited them.
‘He was very persuasive with Diana. It was all about him being from the BBC, being respectable and very pious even. But he filled her head with rubbish, such as that stuff about the nanny Tiggy [Legge-Bourke] being pregnant with Charles’s child.’
During her courtship with Mr Khan, Diana initially referred to Bashir as Dr Jarman – a secret name she gave for her so- called ‘mole’ due to fears her telephone line was being tapped. Mr Khan said she told him there was ‘a listening station in Kent where they eavesdropped on prominent people’ and that ‘the brakes on her
Audi had been tampered with’.
When Mr Khan and the princess met Bashir at a pub, the surgeon said he was left offended. ‘Almost from the word go, he started asking me the most direct personal questions about Diana and our relationship. Why didn’t we get married?... It was intimate stuff,’ he said.
The fact she had recorded a TV i nterview was kept secret. Mr Khan was one of the few people Diana told, but after watching it he told her it was ‘terrible’ and a ‘ big mistake’. He said Diana appeared on Panorama because her philandering husband had got away with ‘whatever he wanted’ – but she needed to force a divorce in order to ‘date who she liked’.
The Mail’s revelations prompted the BBC to commission an inquiry led by a former UK supreme court judge, John Dyson. It is expected to take six months in total.
Last night there was no response to requests for comment to the BBC, Mr Dyson’s inquiry, Martin Bashir or his agent.
‘Started asking personal questions’