BBC apology to Royals over Diana interview
■ ‘Serious breach of rules’ by shamed journalist ■ Broadcaster’s ‘woeful’ investigation of scandal
THE BBC has written to the Royal Family to apologise for the circumstances surrounding the Panorama interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, it is understood.
The corporation has also returned the awards it received for the explosive TV programme in 1995.
An inquiry found the BBC covered up the “deceitful behaviour” Bashir used to secure his headline-making world exclusive and “fell short of high standards of integrity and transparency”.
The journalist was in “serious breach” of the BBC’s producer guidelines when he faked bank statements and showed them to Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, to gain access to the princess, the report said.
Bashir, inset, won a Bafta in 1996 for the interview.
The BBC said in a statement: “The 1995 Panorama interview received a number of awards at the time.
“We do not believe it is acceptable to retain these awards because of how the interview was obtained.” The corporation has also sent personal apologies to the Prince of Wales, the dukes of Cambridge and Sussex and Diana’s brother Earl Spencer.
Leeds Grammar School-educated
Lord Dyson, the former head of civil justice, was appointed to look into the circumstances surrounding the interview.
His findings yesterday came as MPs labelled the BBC complacent for its attitude towards declining audiences, with 200,000 people a year cancelling their licence fee and young people switching over to Netflix.
The Commons Public Accounts Committee also accused the broadcaster of having “ducked the hard choices” when it came to shoring up its finances and branded its plans to raise revenue outside the annual £159 television licence “unambitious”. Parliament’s spending watchdog, in a report published today, urged bosses at Broadcasting House – who are in talks with ministers over the future of the licence fee – to “radically re-engineer its offer” in the face of declining audience numbers.
The committee’s BBC Strategic Financial Management report said that in the last half of 2017, 16 to 24-year-olds were spending more time on Netflix than BBC TV and its iPlayer service.
The BBC also lost its place as the provider that youngsters aged six to 15 spent most time with, MPs said.
THE BBC covered up the deceitful behaviour journalist Martin Bashir used to secure his Panorama interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, and “fell short of the high standards of integrity and transparency,” the official inquiry into the scandal concluded yesterday.
The journalist was in “serious breach” of the BBC’s producer guidelines when he faked bank statements and showed them to Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, to gain access to the princess, the report said.
Bashir, who resigned as the BBC’s religious editor last week on health grounds, commissioned documents purporting to show payments into the bank account of Alan Waller, a former employee of Earl Spencer, Commander Patrick Jephson, Diana’s private secretary, and Commander Richard Aylard, private secretary to the Prince of Wales, according to Lord Dyson.
The Leeds-born former master of the rolls and head of civil justice was appointed to look into the circumstances surrounding the explosive 1995 interview.
The report said: “By showing Earl Spencer the fake Waller and Jephson/Aylard statements and informing him of their contents, Mr Bashir deceived and induced him to arrange a meeting with Princess Diana. By gaining access to Princess Diana in this way, Mr Bashir was able to persuade her to agree to give the interview.”
An internal investigation by the BBC into the matter in 1996 was “woefully ineffective,” it added.
The report found the BBC inquiry “did not scrutinise Mr Bashir’s
account with the necessary degree of scepticism and caution”, despite the fact Bashir “had lied three times when he said that he had not shown the fake statements to Earl Spencer”.
It said Bashir had lied when he said that he had not shown the documents to anyone, when he had in fact shown them to Earl Spencer and he repeated this lie twice more.
It also said Bashir was unable or unwilling to offer a credible explanation of why he had commissioned the faking of statements and why he had shown them to Earl Spencer, and Earl Spencer was not approached to give his version of what had happened. The report said: “They accepted the account that Mr Bashir gave them as truthful.”
Lord Dyson added: “I have concluded that, without justification, the BBC covered up in its press logs such facts as it had been able to establish about how Mr Bashir secured the interview and failed to mention the issue at all on any news programme and thereby fell short of the high standards of integrity and transparency which are its hallmark.”
Bashir has apologised for faking the documents and said it was “an action I deeply regret” but added he felt it had “no bearing whatsoever on the personal choice by Princess Diana to take part in the interview”.
He added: “Evidence handed to the inquiry in her own handwriting [and published alongside the report] unequivocally confirms this and other compelling evidence presented to Lord Dyson reinforces it.
“Lord Dyson himself in any event accepts that the princess would probably have agreed to be interviewed without what he describes as my ‘intervention’.”