DIANA’S LOVER SAVAGES BASHIR
Diana lover Hasnat Khan breaks silence to savage Bashir over THAT interview – and reveals her son’s fury
DIANA’S former lover Hasnat Khan has broken his silence to expose how the ‘cunning’ Martin Bashir preyed on the princess.
Mr Khan said the BBC reporter ‘filled her head with rubbish’ until Prince William, then a teenager, warned her: ‘ Mummy, he’s not a good person.’
In an unprecedented interview, Mr Khan – the shy surgeon with whom Diana was infatuated – lifted the lid on the breathtaking tactics Bashir deployed to land his infamous 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 underhand methods used by Bashir to trick Diana into giving her bombshell 1995 TV interview, which saw her declare: ‘ There were three of us in this marriage.’ Her brother, Earl Spencer, claims Bashir spun a web of deceit, claiming senior royals and courtiers betrayed Diana to newspapers and MI5, in order to draw the vulnerable princess into his confidence.
The Mail’s revelations prompted the BBC to commission an inquiry, led by former Supreme Court judge Lord Dyson.
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’ the 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
■ The reporter’s bogus claims included that Camilla Parker Bowles had flown to America 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 interview to force 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, now a consultant surgeon at Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals in Essex, 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 that 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.
The couple met, he reveals, when the princess shouted at the Pakistani-born medic as he left work one day: ‘ Oi, where are you going?’
Mr Khan said: ‘One of her most attractive qualities was her vulnerability. It was what endeared her to the public. 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 secret listening station in Kent where they
Khan: I did not trust Bashir. He filled her head with lies’
BBC man told her: You’re the target of a Kent listening post’