Hall: I didn’t destroy missing Diana memo
FORMER BBC boss Lord Hall yesterday angrily denied destroying key evidence that proved Martin Bashir was a serial liar.
A ‘missing memo’ from 1996 was unearthed by Lord Dyson – but had been mysteriously absent from the BBC’s files. The 1996 note, written by then-BBC executive Tim Gardam, is the single most important piece of evidence in the Bashir saga.
Mr Gardam wrote in March that year how the reporter had lied three times to his bosses over whether he had shown faked bank statements to Earl Spencer – before finally confessing that he had.
In 1996, Mr Gardam handed his explosive memo to ‘the office of Lord Hall’, said Lord Dyson. After that, it appears to have gone missing.
But yesterday Lord Hall, who was BBC head of news and current affairs at the time, said he could not remember the document. When MP John Nicolson asked him, ‘Did you destroy it?’, he replied: ‘Absolutely not.’
The memo is central because it proves the BBC had established by March 28, 1996, that its star reporter was a serial liar. In April that year, Lord Hall wrote a statement for the BBC board of governors describing Bashir as an ‘honest’ and ‘honourable’ man who had made a simple mistake by mocking up fake statements.
But he admitted yesterday these words had been ‘inappropriate’.
Yet he was unable to explain why the damning handwritten memo was missing from BBC files. A copy was handed to Lord Dyson by Mr Gardam.
Mr Nicolson asked current BBC director-general Tim Davie if he consulted Lord Hall before his ‘dismissive email’ to Earl Spencer last year.
He said: ‘Did you phone Tony Hall to ask him about events? He was sitting on this crucial piece of information. Had you spoken to Tony Hall, you would have discovered Bashir had lied three times.’
Mr Davie told the MPs the key memo had only come to light because he commissioned Lord Dyson’s inquiry – which then unearthed it.