Five claims made in new book about Princess Diana’s Panorama interview

30 years after the most infamous interview in BBC history was broadcast, a new book looks at what led to Martin Bashir cheating on Diana, Princess of Wales, and how the BBC responded in the aftermath.

Dianarama, written by Andy Webb, re-examines the Panorama interview. The late princess famously said there were “three of us” in her marriage to Prince Charles, now King.

Former Panorama correspondent Bashir secured the interview with Diana in 1995 after showing his brother fake bank statements suggesting payments from people close to the princess were made by the MI5 security service.

The book states that Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, did not initially criticize Bashir for the interview because he did not want to say anything that would question Diana’s decision to talk to him.

“To come out as a strong critic of Bashir would actually mean portraying his sister as a gullible fool,” Webb writes. “It’s much better to say nothing than to open a rift in the family.”

The book reveals that Earl Spencer finally made his concerns public in 2020, when Webb was making a Channel 4 documentary about the interview.

Webb had obtained documents from the BBC under freedom of information rules about a report to BBC governors by Tony Hall, the then director of BBC News.

They claimed that instead of Bashir showing the bank statements to Earl Spencer, the earl showed the bank statements to Bashir.

The Count later had an angry 40-minute phone call to Webb on the morning the Channel 4 documentary was shown on television, outlining for the first time how he had been given statements by Bashir and some other outlandish allegations.

Webb writes that a few hours before broadcast, he made a decision based on “little more than a gut feeling” that the BBC was lying and Earl Spencer was telling the truth.

The press release issued by the book’s publishers states that the book was written “with the full support of Charles Spencer.”

As well as showing Earl Spencer fake bank statements, the book also highlights a series of lurid and untrue claims Bashir made to him about the Royal Family, including the then Prince Charles.

In his book, Webb writes that Bashir is “pathologically, convincingly attractive. Ruthless.”

Following the interview, Bashir continued to work for ITV and US broadcasters. He returned to the BBC as religion editor in 2016 and resigned from the company in 2021 due to health issues, shortly before former Supreme Court judge Lord Dyson published a highly critical report about his conduct.

Lord Hall, the BBC’s director general, was judged by Lord Dyson in 2021 to have conducted a “dismal and ineffective” investigation into Bashir.

Webb says that had she told BBC executives the whole truth in 1996, “one can only imagine the consequences for Diana”.

A BBC spokesman said the company fully accepted Lord Dyson’s findings and publicly apologized for its part in the report’s conclusions.

Lord Hall told BBC News he had nothing to add to his apology after the Dyson report in which he admitted the BBC’s 1996 investigation into Bashir “did not meet the required standards”.

There was no response to BBC News’ approach to Martin Bashir’s representative.

The book also suggests that the Prince of Wales “took steps to discover” the truth about Martin Bashir’s interview.

Prince William slammed BBC executives after Lord Dyson’s report, saying they were “looking the other way rather than asking tough questions”.

He said the meeting contributed greatly to the deterioration of his parents’ relationship and contributed significantly to his fear, paranoia and isolation before his death.

The book includes a warning from an unnamed source telling the BBC that William was a “mortal enemy” and that “there were people interested in the case”. Kensington Palace is not commenting on the book.

Matt Wiessler, a freelance designer whom Bashir asked to produce fake bank statements, was paid compensation by the BBC and received an apology after being banned from working for the company in 1996.

But the book reveals the personal guilt he felt after Princess Diana’s death in 1997, to the extent that he joined the mourning crowds at Buckingham Palace.

“I was standing by the door at 4 a.m. because I felt so strongly that I had a hand in this,” Wiessler says.

Although there have been reports of a burglary in Wiessler’s apartment in the past, targeting the floppy disks on which he stored his unwitting forgeries, the book describes a burglar who allegedly stole the designer’s “[excrement] downstairs in my toilet” to find it.

Webb decided to begin his research after watching the 2006 play Frost/Nixon, about another famous television interview between David Frost and former US president Richard Nixon.

He was inspired to make a documentary about the making of the Panorama interview, and has already discovered the story of the hoax in two books: a history of the Panorama program and one of Andrew Morton’s biographies of Diana.

The book also reveals that he was investigating the employer of his wife, Diana Martin, Panorama’s deputy editor, when he started working on his own documentary.

Ms Martin’s father Christopher also produced, with Jonathan Dimbleby, the 1994 ITV documentary in which Prince Charles confessed to adultery.

Andy Webb says it’s doubtful Princess Diana would have agreed to speak to Bashir if it weren’t for this programme.