BBC’s Diana cover-up may prove worse than its crime

I REMEMBER vividly Princess Diana’s Panorama interview. I had to cover it for work and although I had assumed that it would be a mad dash to make the deadline, Panorama being screened so late, the piece just wrote itself.

Almost everything Diana said was shocking – from her infamous declaration about there being ‘three of us’ in her marriage to her conviction that Prince Charles wouldn’t make a good king.

But the biggest thunderbolt was watching a member of the most rarefied family in the world, who rigidly controlled every aspect of its public image, break ranks to air their dirty linen and reveal their personal problems to Martin Bashir as if he were an agony aunt.

The investigation into the landmark programme reveals that the unprecedented stream of intimate revelations from Diana about adultery, family backbiting and bulimia arose because Bashir used deception, false documents, smear tactics and blackmail to manipulate her into believing he was the only person she could trust. It also emerges that when his tactics became known, the BBC stuck its head in the sand, rather than censure him.

Diana was in a vulnerable state, released from an unhappy marriage and maybe addicted a little to the spotlight of fame. That the BBC, cornerstone of British democracy and voice of the Establishment covered up how one of its star journalists disgracefully stretched the limits of hard-nosed reporting to entrap a fragile public figure into revealing her innermost secrets almost beggars belief.

As we know from the Catholic Church’s handling of clerical sex abuse, the BBC’s authority may suffer most in this debacle. It may be another case of the cover-up being a greater scandal than the crime.