BBC interview did not harm Diana, claims Martin
Bashir
Journalist defends 1995 Panorama special saying he and
Diana stayed friends after the broadcast
Martin Bashir says Diana was not unhappy about the
contents of the 1995 interview.
PA Media
Sun 23 May
2021 00.35 BST
Martin
Bashir has said he “never wanted to harm” Diana, Princess of Wales with the
Panorama interview, adding: “I don’t believe we did.”
The
journalist’s reputation is in tatters following Lord Dyson’s report that he
used “deceitful behaviour” to land his world exclusive 1995 interview.
Speaking to
the Sunday Times, Bashir maintained Diana was never unhappy about the content
of the interview and said they continued to be friends after the broadcast,
with the princess even visiting his wife, Deborah, at St George’s hospital in
Tooting, south London, on the day Deborah gave birth to the couple’s third
child, Eliza.
He told the
newspaper: “I never wanted to harm Diana in any way and I don’t believe we did.
“Everything
we did in terms of the interview was as she wanted, from when she wanted to
alert the palace, to when it was broadcast, to its contents … My family and I
loved her.”
He said he
is “deeply sorry” to the dukes of Cambridge and Sussex, but disputes William’s
charge that he fuelled her isolation and paranoia.
“Even in
the early 1990s, there were stories and secretly recorded phone calls. I wasn’t
the source of any of that,” he said.
Diana’s
brother, Earl Spencer, has said he “draws a line” between the interview and his
sister’s death, claiming Bashir’s actions led her to give up her royal security
detail.
Bashir, who
left the BBC last week due to ill health, said: “I don’t feel I can be held
responsible for many of the other things that were going on in her life, and
the complex issues surrounding those decisions.
“I can
understand the motivation [of Earl Spencer’s comments] but to channel the
tragedy, the difficult relationship between the royal family and the media
purely on to my shoulders feels a little unreasonable … The suggestion I am
singularly responsible I think is unreasonable and unfair.”
Bashir
commissioned documents purporting to show payments into the bank accounts of
members of the royal household and showed them to Earl Spencer, according to
Lord Dyson.
He said:
“Obviously I regret it, it was wrong. But it had no bearing on anything. It had
no bearing on [Diana], it had no bearing on the interview.”
He said he
is now concerned the scandal will overshadow the content of what Diana said in
the interview.
“She was a
pioneering princess. When you think about her expressions of grief in her
marriage, when you think about the admission of psychiatric illness – just
extraordinary! And her sons have gone on to champion mental health,” he said.
“I don’t
understand what the purpose of this is ultimately? OK, maybe you want to
destroy me, but outside of this, what’s the point?
“I did
something wrong … but for pity’s sake, acknowledge something of the
relationship we had and something of what she contributed through that
interview.
“One of the
saddest things about all of this has been the way the content of what she said
has almost been ignored.”
Bashir’s
comments come after former BBC director-general Lord Hall quit as chairman of
the National Gallery after he was heavily criticised in the Dyson report for
his botched inquiry into how the interview was obtained.
They won’t remind us, but the tabloids hurt Diana just as much as Panorama did
Marina Hyde
The BBC makes a convenient scapegoat when in reality
all of us were part of the ecosystem that destroyed Diana
Photofusion/UIG
via Getty Images
Fri 21 May
2021 13.05 BST
“It brings
indescribable sadness,” ran Prince William’s statement on the damning report
into Panorama’s interview with his mother, “to know that the BBC’s failures
contributed significantly to her fear, paranoia and isolation that I remember
from those final years with her.”
“Paranoia”
– what a word to take you back. When Martin Bashir’s Diana interview aired in
1995, the MP (and friend of Prince Charles) Nicholas Soames was roundly
attacked for describing Diana as in “the advanced stages of paranoia” and in
the grip of “mental illness”. It’s fair to say his verdict didn’t come from a
place of total support. Soames has since expressed regret for it, adding that
he wasn’t a doctor. Now Diana’s elder son uses the same word – with few these
days disagreeing how cruelly she was driven to it – while her younger son
absolutely refuses to draw some comforting veil over her state of mental
health.
The
conclusions of the Dyson report are a shameful stain on the BBC, deeply
compounded by coming 26 years after the offence, by way of cover-up and
whitewash. How completely stunning that former director general Tony Hall
judged Bashir “an honest and honourable man”, when anything more than cursory
scrutiny marked him out so clearly – and I’m not a doctor – as a complete wrong
’un. It feels particularly gracious that Prince Harry’s own statement tacitly
acknowledged the BBC for “taking some form of accountability” and “owning it”.
And so to
people yet to take ownership of their own actions. I think we can live without
today’s preposterous moralising from much of Fleet Street, who know very well
the terrible things they and others did on countless occasions to get stories
relating to Diana or her wider family. “Defund the BBC,” was last night’s
pontification from former Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie, who once put Diana’s
covertly recorded private phone calls on a premium-rate line so readers could ring
in and have a listen. And those were the good years. Half the stuff these guys
did in pursuit of Diana stories is, mercifully for them, completely
unprintable.
Alas, we
will spend the next few days hearing of the BBC’s shame from some of the most
shameless hypocrites in human history. The tabloids may not like Prince Harry’s
reincarnation as a super-rich Californian wellness bore, but it does have the
moral edge over pulling people’s medical records and hacking the phones of
murdered 13-year-old girls.
But of
course, few have rewritten their own history more than Fleet Street’s
Diana-watchers. The overnight timing of the Paris crash meant the early
editions of the Sunday papers had already been printed and contained, as usual,
large amounts of unfavourable stuff about whatever else Diana had been up to
the previous week. “Troubled Prince William will today demand that his mother
Princess Diana dump her playboy lover”, ran an exclusive by the News of the
World’s Clive Goodman, who probably scraped it from the “troubled” schoolboy’s
phone. There were acres in similar vein across the titles. “The Princess, I
fear,” feared the Sunday Mirror’s Carole Malone, “suffers from the ‘Open Gob
Before Brain Engages’ syndrome – a condition which afflicts the trivial and the
brain dead.” When Diana’s death was announced, the reverse ferrets were so
total that it’s genuinely quite a surprise the Sunday Mirror didn’t next week
salute itself as “the paper that broke the tragic news Di was brain dead”.
As for the
editors, the person they secretly canonised was the driver, Henri Paul. Because
once it was discovered he was over the alcohol limit, then what happened to
Diana in the tunnel couldn’t have been anything to do with the ecosystem in
which they (and the chasing paparazzi who supplied them) were such voracious
feeders.
Twenty-four
years later, a full-spectrum failure to acknowledge any of this means many of
these same people now sit and venerate Diana in the course of slagging off her
troubled son, Prince Harry (it’s what she would have wanted). They know very
well the pain and turmoil of Diana’s final years, having been such a helpful
part of it, yet cannot tolerate the understandably damaged child raised amid
it.
And so it
is that Prince Harry is now locked in his own grimly symbiotic relationship
with sections of the British media. He won’t shut up, which is what they claim
to want, but don’t, because his every SHAMELESS! AND! DISGRACEFUL! UTTERANCE!
drives traffic. Attacks on Harry do huge business, so they continue. He, in
turn, can point to those attacks as continued evidence of persecution. (Indeed,
his livelihood might end up depending on wounded, marquee interviews. I’m not
sure that long-term ratings lie in the Sussexes’ dull-sounding ideas for
documentaries in which they themselves do not feature.) This is nearly as toxic
a cycle as the one in which Diana was locked, and is unlikely to have a happy
ending, or even a happy middle.
I once saw
some old news footage in which the Queen and Prince Philip returned home from a
royal tour after leaving their children for six months. A mere part of the
welcome party, the unsmiling five-year-old Prince Charles waits dutifully –
simply required to shake his mother’s hand. Anyone claiming this was entirely
normal “in those days” has royal brain worms. Yet Prince Harry’s recent
suggestion that neither he nor his father had an especially healthy childhood
is regarded as some kind of grotesque blasphemy, mostly by people who would be
quite happy to refer to the above vignette as child abuse were anyone other
than the Queen involved. These days, what is expected of the royals has become
so warped that it is perfectly standard to find MailOnline commenters fuming of
Prince Harry “how DARE he bring his mother into this?”
Which
brings us to the final group not to own their own actions: the great British
public. Millions bought insatiably into Diana’s pain, and newspaper sales
spiked for all the most obviously intrusive stories. The pall of blameless
sanctimony that descended after her death was a stunning exercise in mass
hypocrisy. People were simply incapable of imagining that they too had been
part of the ecosystem, and those who pointed it out were demonised by
deflection. Private Eye was monstered for its cover, which carried the headline
“MEDIA TO BLAME” above a crowd of people outside Buckingham Palace. “The papers
are a disgrace,” read one speech bubble. “Yes, I couldn’t get one anywhere,”
ran its reply. “Borrow mine,” went a third, “it’s got a picture of the car.” WH
Smith banned the edition from its stores, while taking money for the papers
hand over fist.
From Diana
to Harry, damaged people do damaged and sometimes very damaging things. But it’s
important to remember, as far as the royal family is concerned, that the public
likes it so much better that way. Royal pain sells far more than royal
happiness. Panorama may have lied – but the sales tallies and the traffic
figures and the ratings never do.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
Former BBC boss Lord Hall resigns from National
Gallery after Diana row
As controversy rages over Panorama interview, Tony
Hall says continuing in role ‘would be a distraction’
Nadeem
Badshah
Sat 22 May
2021 14.18 BST
Tony Hall
has resigned as chairman of the National Gallery amid the controversy over the
BBC Panorama interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1995.
The
corporation’s former director general was severely criticised in Lord Dyson’s
report for overseeing a flawed and “woefully ineffective” internal
investigation into how Martin Bashir obtained the interview.
Lord Hall
said his continued presence at the gallery would be a “distraction”.
The peer,
who was director of BBC news and current affairs at the time that Bashir
interviewed Diana, said: “I have today resigned as chair of the National
Gallery.
“I have
always had a strong sense of public service and it is clear my continuing in
the role would be a distraction to an institution I care deeply about.
“As I said
two days ago, I am very sorry for the events of 25 years ago and I believe
leadership means taking responsibility.”
The report
by Dyson, a former master of the rolls, found that Bashir had engaged in
“deceitful behaviour” by commissioning fake bank statements to secure the
interview. It also found that Hall was aware the journalist had told “serious
and unexplained lies” about what he had done to persuade the princess to speak to
him.
When other
media began asking questions about how the programme had secured the world
exclusive, Dyson said the corporation “covered up in its press logs” what it
knew.
The report
said: “Without justification, the BBC fell short of the high standards of
integrity and transparency which are its hallmark.”
Sir John
Kingman, deputy chair of the National Gallery’s board of trustees, said: “Tony
Hall has been doing a superb job as chair of the National Gallery, where he is
much respected and liked. The gallery is extremely sorry to lose him, but of
course we entirely understand and respect his decision.”
Dr Gabriele
Finaldi, director of the National Gallery, thanked Hall for his work at the
institution. He said the former BBC director general had “demonstrated
extraordinary commitment to the gallery and it has been a great pleasure to
work closely with him as we have faced the challenges of Covid and as we
prepare to mark the gallery’s bicentenary in 2024”.
Earl
Spencer, Diana’s brother, is reported to have written to the Met commissioner,
Cressida Dick, asking the force to investigate the BBC and saying his sister
had been the victim of blackmail and fraud.
A
spokesperson for the Met said it would not be adding to its previous statement,
which confirmed a further assessment following publication of Dyson’s report.
The force
said this week: “Following the publication of Lord Dyson’s report we will
assess its contents to ensure there is no significant new evidence.”
On
Thursday, Prince William and Prince Harry also condemned the BBC over the
Panorama interview. William said the corporation’s failures contributed to the
fear their mother felt in her final years, and Harry said it was part of a
“culture of exploitation and unethical practices that ultimately took her
life”.
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