The royal marriage was already doomed before Bashir’s deceit
BBC journalist Martin Bashir’s fakery and deceitful behaviour, which helped him secure that extraordinary Panorama interview with Princess Diana in 1995, deserves the kind of condemnation it’s now getting. But, let’s not lose the run of ourselves. Bashir’s manipulation of a clearly vulnerable young woman, who at the time was battling her own demons while under the unremitting glare of media and public scrutiny, does not mean that what Princess Diana said in that interview is invalidated.
Or that she shouldn’t have been allowed to tell her side of the story, or that the programme shouldn’t ever be broadcast again.
Following Lord Dyson’s report, Prince William’s insistence now that the Panorama interview fuelled his mother’s paranoia and worsened her relationship with his father, Prince Charles, deserves examination because of its audacious implausibility.
Firstly, his parents’ marriage shattered at least nine years before that famous television extravaganza which drew in more than 20 million viewers.
During 1991 and 1992 Princess Diana cooperated with Andrew Morton’s fly-on-the-wall book about her life inside the Firm and this in turn led to a television documentary in 1993.
Also, in 1992 we had ‘Squidgygate’, the publication of telephone conversations between the princess and a close male friend in which she speculated about whether she might be pregnant. Around that time also the Camillagate tapes were published, making clear the intimate nature (to put it as its most polite) of Prince Charles’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles.
And we shouldn’t forget either that in June 1994 – 17 months before the Panorama interview – it was Prince Charles who took the initiative in the public relations battle then raging between the royal couple for the hearts and minds of the great British unwashed by doing an interview with Jonathan Dimbleby on ITV.
In that, Prince Charles confirmed what everybody, including Diana, had known for years – an extramarital affair with Parker Bowles had been ongoing, full-throttle, since 1986, after his marriage to Diana shattered.
Dimbleby asked him if he had tried to be faithful and honourable to Diana, whom he’d married in July, 1981, to which the prince replied: ‘Yes, absolutely.’
When pressed on whether he’d been faithful, Prince Charles replied: ‘Yes, until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.’
And that’s the point. This royal marriage was well and truly over, and for years, by the end of 1995 – a breakdown, coupled with the obviously oppressive experience of living the role of wife to the next king of England, that manifestly caused huge torment to Princess Diana.
IT’S natural, as Prince William clearly wishes to do, for any child to seek to narrow the gap between parents who can no longer get on. We all want our existence to have some kind of extrinsic validation and the urgency to minimise parental disharmony may be greater when one of those parents is no longer alive.
His assertion that the deceitful way the interview with his mother was obtained ‘substantially influenced what my mother said’ must be seen in that context. Because, in the light of facts we all know, this simply doesn’t stand up to even cursory examination.
As for Prince Harry – well, his remarks show how infected he’s become with the woke tsunami sweeping over the United States and threatening the rest of the world as well. After the BBC apology he said: ‘To those who have taken some form of accountability, thank you for owning it.’
It’s hard to know whether this is just pure innocence or common or garden idiocy. But it has resonances of Meghan Markle’s story to Oprah Williams about being reduced to tears by Kate Middleton and how Middleton later apologised and ‘owned’ her mistake.
The truth is that the BBC were dragged roaring and screaming to their apology. They had covered up Bashir’s chicanery for years and had no intention of ever admitting their knowledge of that deceit.
The British royal family will continue to marvel and entertain us for as long as it exists – a gift that keeps on giving. However, instead of bashing Bashir, perhaps in the fullness of time the real architects of deceit will be exposed as those who charmed a very young woman into sacrificing her life to marry a future king just four weeks after she’d celebrated her 20th birthday.