The Beastly BBC, The People’s Princess, And Their Dreadfully Long Shadows

It was a grey, overcast Thursday after a dreary day of sixth form when I saw Prince William step out, with eyes fixed and ready, to deliver a statement pertaining to BBC impropriety regarding the acquisition of the infamous 1995 Panorama interview with his mother Diana, Princess of Wales.

This statement was one intended for the ears of current BBC bosses and of days gone by. Responding to the findings of the report written by Lord Dyson, William did not refrain from discrediting the content of the interview.

Since Martin Bashir’s duping of the Princess, wherein he exercised BBC journalistic integrity to insert himself into an already sulphurous war of the Wales’s, we’ve had a pandemic, an outbreak of war in mainland Europe, an attack on the world trade centre in New York as well as the financial crisis of 2008. So why after 30 years is this issue still a relevant one today? In his new book Dianarama, Andy Webb delves into the deceit of Martin Bashir and how the ostensibly formidable institution that is the BBC attempted to conceal the outcomes of their own internal investigations.

This book analyses the effects of the individuals who were treated as collateral damage, specifically the graphic designer Matt Weisler, who forged bank documents that showed members of the now King’s household receiving mysterious sums of money from even more obscure companies acting as a front for the security services. Bashir’s desired narrative? That the Princess was under threat from an unrelenting smear campaign from both within the royal family and without. From Diana’s perspective this was more than feasible, by the time Bashir entered her orbit in the autumn of 1995, she already had concerns for her safety and privacy after the release of the ‘Squidgy Gate’ tapes in 1992 and the death of her lover and protection officer Barry Mannakee in 1987. 

In fact, ‘Squidgy Gate’ does raise pertinent questions as to whether there was someone out there who wanted to derail the credibility of the Princess of Wales. The individual that brought the tape to The Sun was a then 70-year-old former TSB bank manager, named Cyril Reenan. In his spare time Reenan would use a recording device, which in 1992 costed around £900, to listen in to people’s phone calls in the local area of Abingdon (Oxfordshire). Despite it being plausible that he may have intercepted James Gilbey and Diana’s call, when he was interviewed for a local newspaper he said that he had recorded the phone call at a different time to when it had taken place – January 4^th 1990, not New Years Eve 1989. Not only does this fuel conspiracies of surveillance around Diana; it also raises questions of how Reenan managed to stumble across this call days after it had taken place. The then Home Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, amid mounting pressure after this breach of privacy, had to make a public statement denying that neither MI5 nor GCHQ were behind the leaking, Reenan died in 2004 aged 82.

As Webb details in the book, this is not the only murky element of this enigmatic story. Post-Panorama, Martin Bashir shot off into the stratosphere, earning himself a global name for being an expert at ingratiating himself with the most inaccessible figures. Whilst his career gained traction, matters at the BBC were less glittery. Rumours swirled that he had deceived the Princess and her brother Earl Spencer, which culminated in the BBC conducting an internal investigation in early 1996. That inquiry found no wrongdoing, but it later became apparent that they had failed to interview key witnesses and comprehensively unpick the allegations of forged documents. The acting head of weekly programmes, Anne Sloman, chose the bluntest of language to summarise her findings, writing that ‘The Diana story is probably now dead, unless Spencer talks.’ These words are all the more chilling, now that we are armed with the facts that substantiate the claims that the BBC wanted to suppress the truth behind its biggest interview of the 1990s – and the death of Diana in Paris in the summer of 1997.

Amid new claims, including those from Earl Spencer that Bashir had shown him forged bank statements to gain his trust, which would then open the door to Diana, the BBC announced an independent inquiry in November 2020. Chaired by the highly accomplished barrister Lord Dyson, this investigation sought to find out how exactly the young reporter managed to secure an interview with the then future Queen and whether his methods met BBC standards. Through his scrupulous research, Webb proves how the Dyson report also did not adequately address key failings, with him arguing that the BBC using taxpayer money through the licence fee to cover the £1.4 million investigation represented not accountability, but a further example of the Corporation marking its own homework while passing the financial burden of its mistakes on to the public.

For the BBC, this marks another misstep. The journalistic dominance and brand that was once above all critique is beginning to creak under the weight of a new age, a time where news is accessible from your phone to the smart watches on our wrists. Of course, the case of Diana and Martin Bashir took place when the internet was in its infancy; the corporations lack of transparency in this matter has simply added fuel to the fire of all the BBC-bashing that now feels commonplace. Since President Trump filed a $10 billion suit for the splicing of two clips in an episode of Panorama, claiming that he was deliberately defamed and falsely depicted as encouraging the January 6^th insurrectionists, more questions around the need for a public broadcaster rear their heads.

At the very centre is a woman, the mother to the future king. Lines have been drawn, indeed by Earl Spencer and Andy Webb in this book, between that interview and Diana’s untimely death in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in August 1997. The chaos that ensued after her divorce was unrelenting, made worse by the interview and how much it exposed her. To the press and paparazzi, her image was theirs. Sadly, she went to her grave not knowing the full extent of this ordeal, but William has ensured that the interview be delegitimised and never broadcast again, for his mother’s dignity as well as absolute clarity.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Ross Quinlan

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