Martin Bashir used Earl Spencer to manipulate Princess Diana into giving Panorama interview: Report
BBC has found itself in deep trouble as a former Supreme Court judge's inquiry reveals that the 1995 Panorama interview former journalist Martin Bashir took of Princess Diana was acquired on dubious grounds. Bashir forged bank documents and peddled lies to Diana about senior royals to get her in front of the camera.
He did so via her brother Earl Spencer, who now says he "draws a line" between the Panorama interview with his sister and her death two years later. Following an inquiry conducted by Lord Dyson, it was revealed that BBC covered up "deceitful behavior" used by Bashir to secure his headline-making world exclusive, award-winning interview and "fell short of high standards of integrity and transparency". The interview went on to not only severely affect Diana's already strained marriage but also had ripple effects that continue to date.
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'Serious breach'
The report released by Lord Dyson found out that the journalist was in "serious breach" of the BBC’s producer guidelines when he faked bank statements and showed them to Spencer to gain access to the princess. Earl Spencer has now reportedly told a new Panorama program that the consequences of Diana’s decision to do the interview led to her death in a car crash in Paris on August 31, 1997.
Earl Spencer has also said earlier that he was “duped” and “groomed” by Martin Bashir in a bid to land an interview with his sister Diana Princess Of Wales. In a written statement to Lord Dyson’s inquiry into the circumstances surrounding her explosive Panorama interview in 1995, the earl said he did not have proof he had been deceived until late 2020.
He said: “I had come to accept that Bashir had shown me fake bank accounts to groom me, so that he could then get to Diana for the interview he was always secretly after. However, I had no proof that this was the case. It was not until last October 2020 that I received that proof, in the form of the FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] papers released by the BBC that month, which finally conceded the fact that Bashir had commissioned forgery as part of his plan to dupe me, en route for Diana."
Did interview lead to Diana's death?
Earl Spencer told the program, "The irony is that I met Martin Bashir on the 31st of August 1995, because exactly two years later she died, and I do draw a line between the two events."
"It's quite clear from the introduction that I sat in on the 19th of September 1995 everyone was going to be made untrustworthy, and I think that Diana did lose trust in really key people."
"This is a young girl in her mid-30s who has lived this extraordinarily turbulent and difficult time in the public eye. She didn’t know who to trust and in the end, when she died two years later, she was without any form of real protection."
This is the first time that Spencer publicly made a connection between Princess Diana's death and the interview. At the time, she had said the famous words that there were "three of us in this marriage" in relation to Prince Charles’ extramarital affair with Camilla Parker Bowles. A year later, the couple would divorce in 1996.
'Ineffective' internal investigation
An internal investigation by the BBC into the matter in 1996 was "woefully ineffective", the report added. Lord Dyson's report found the BBC inquiry "did not scrutinize Mr Bashir’s account with the necessary degree of skepticism and caution”, despite the fact he "had lied three times when he said that he had not shown the fake statements to Earl Spencer".
Diana's son, Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, reportedly welcomed the launch of the investigation late last year, saying it "should help establish the truth behind the actions" that led to the program. The investigation was launched after Spencer alleged that the former BBC journalist produced fake financial documents relating to his sister's former private secretary Patrick Jephson, another former royal household member, and peddled lies and false stories about the royal family to gain access to Diana.
Earl Spencer left out of BBC inquiry
As per the Dyson report, during the previous investigation when Bashir was asked about a credible explanation as to why he had commissioned fake statements and why showed them to Spencer, he was "unable or unwilling" to give it. Spencer was also 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."