The BBC betrayed Diana and its own standards but has yet to explain why

Sometimes it feels like Diana never really died. She’s still ubiquitous. The tributes marking her death now give way to tasters for Netflix’s The Crown, to be broadcast in November.

She’s also reborn for the Instagram age. The People’s Princess lives on in millions of smart phones, twirling across the Whitehouse ballroom with John Travolta for eternity.

I wasn’t a big Diana fan. But I recall with clarity the moment her death was announced. I was feeding a newborn at dawn. We never moved from the sofa, watching sombre TV, me crying for a young mother I didn’t know, but who was my contemporary.

We’d attended the same glitzy London Christmas party not long before. Other guests went on manoeuvres, hoping for a morsel of conversation. She wore a little black sequinned dress. I kept what I liked to think was a dignified distance, but see her still, sparkling under the lights.

I was shocked by my own shock – and grief – when she died. Although I was just a little younger and “grew up with Diana”, as the cliché has it, I didn’t identify at all with the young aristocrat who first appeared in 1981.

In those post-punk, early years of the first Thatcher government, “Lady Di” was the daily tabloid dish, a pretty decoy from the real story – the deindustrialisation and mass unemployment ravaging communities.

In her true-blue engagement outfit complete with pussy bow, she even dressed like the PM! We wore army surplus, marched for the miners or rocked against racism. Diana was at the polo, the film premiere, the overseas tours – around the world in 80 designer outfits.

We did not see she was so young, vulnerable and exploited. Married off to an older man who loved someone else, Diana was preened, paraded and expected to reproduce before she knew who she was. As she matured, she changed, and her work to support people with Aids and end the use of landmines is her great legacy.

The babe I held the day Diana died is now older than the princess was when she married. Her generation, so sensitive to mental health issues, are rediscovering Diana, and empathising – and so am I.

I now see Diana through a mother’s eyes and feel not just sympathy, but anger. She was an establishment casualty – and not just of the buttoned-up palace courtiers. This re-evaluation also springs from the injustice she suffered at the hands of another elite – the top brass at the BBC.

The princess’s tragic story now plays out through payouts – from the BBC to all those people Martin Bashir slandered in order to win Diana’s trust and gain that Panorama scoop. What the BBC did was far worse than any of the excesses of the redtops or the paparazzi in their pursuit of Diana. Bashir faked documents that falsely showed others to be corrupt, yet he has not been prosecuted. On Friday, the BBC paid £1.4 million to Diana’s charities, but this is about more than money and compensation.

BBC managers covered up this scandal for years, with one of them, Tony Hall, becoming directorgeneral. They sacked whistleblowers and re-hired Bashir. They are a disgrace to journalism and human decency – and the many fine people who work for the BBC.

Diana’s former private secretary Patrick Jephson, one of those slandered, said the Panorama interview and its aftermath led to the princess’s paranoia, isolation and poor decisions, such as dismissing her security detail. Would she have been in that speeding car, driven by a drunk, had she been less isolated?

Good people lost their jobs, reputations and friendships. An already vulnerable woman lost her way, and in the end her life.

Apologies and compensation are easy for the BBC. What seems much an awful lot harder is

honesty and accountability.