A few weeks after the BBC aired their historic Princess Diana interview on November 20, 1995, it became clear they had a problem on their hands. Producers who worked on the program had become concerned about the reporting methods of Martin Bashir, who had snagged the interview and become a journalistic celebrity in the process. They learned that Bashir had asked Matt Wiessler, a BBC graphic designer, to draw up two fake bank statements to show Diana, supposedly to prove a security guard within the royal family was being paid by the British press—and revealing family secrets.
In April 1996, a Mail on Sunday report revealed the existence of the fake bank statements, but the BBC and Bashir denied they had been used in any way. Instead, the BBC began an investigation to find out who had leaked the story to the Mail. Now, 25 years later, the BBC’s position has changed dramatically. Starting late last month, a raft of new documentaries about the interview have been released, including a Channel 4 investigation and a two-night series airing on ITV this week, uncovering new information about what really happened when Bashir allegedly asked Wiessler to forge that document. In response, Diana’s brother, Charles, Earl Spencer, has come forward with his version of events for the first time, making serious allegations about Bashir’s conduct—and the BBC is promising a “robust and independent” investigation into what happened over the months before Diana sat down in front of the cameras.
The controversy proves, as if there was any doubt, that stories about Diana still captivate the public. But because the BBC is publicly funded, the story of the Panorama interview and Bashir’s behavior raise serious questions about the culture of the entire institution. Diana’s death set off a reckoning in the British press about the level of intrusion and harassment she faced during her life. Yet her son, Prince Harry, has spoken about how he continues to face similar media intrusiveness, and he and his wife, Meghan Markle, have engaged in legal battles against multiple newspapers and photo agencies. The ongoing BBC controversy is a sign of how broken the relationship between the British press and the royal family became during the 1990s—but it is also a reminder of how little has changed in the years since her death.
The story of how Bashir secured the interview with Diana begins with a phone call to Spencer in the summer of 1995. According to the Daily Mail, Bashir then visited Spencer at the family home, falsely claiming to have proof that the U.K. security services were spying on Diana, that Prince Charles was plotting against her, and that Spencer’s former head of security Alan Waller was receiving payouts from the British press in exchange for information. In the Mail last Friday, Spencer claimed to have seen the forged bank statements at the meeting, which prompted him to introduce Bashir to Diana.
On September 19, 1995, Bashir, Spencer, and Diana met at a friend’s apartment a short drive from Kensington Palace. According to notes that Spencer took during the meeting, details of which were published by the Mail last Friday, Bashir told Diana a litany of outlandish claims about his research into the royal family: Charles was in love with Tiggy Legge-Bourke, her children’s nanny, who may have recently had an abortion or miscarriage; Prince Edward was being treated for AIDS; Queen Elizabeth was suffering from heart problems; Charles wanted to kill Spencer’s wife. (Needless to say, all of these claims are baseless.) Spencer said he thought the claims were too stupid to be taken seriously and decided Diana should brush Bashir off, adding that he didn’t hear anything about him again until the interview had already been filmed.
In October, Bashir showed up at Wiessler’s apartment at night, asking the graphic designer for a favor. According to the Mail’s 1996 report, Bashir needed forged documents that showed Waller receiving payments from a media company and another company called “Penfolds Consultants.” Wiessler designed the documents according to the specifications and handed them off at Heathrow later on. In an interview with ITV that aired this week, Wiessler said Bashir originally approached him about “making some props for filming purposes,” which is why he decided to make them. It wasn’t until later that he began to have second thoughts.
According to Diana’s biographer, Andrew Morton, this is around the time that Bashir began his hard sell on Diana, despite her hesitations about the BBC and its customary deference to Buckingham Palace. In Diana: In Pursuit of Love, Morton writes that Bashir struck up a rapport with Diana, and when he showed her the forged documents she reacted with “terror and horror.” Morton argues that Bashir wanted to convince Diana he was on her side in her ongoing battle against the royal family, but also intensified her paranoia. In Spencer’s version of events, Bashir took advantage of Diana’s vulnerabilities by convincing her that her worst fears—that she was being spied on and plotted against by her former in-laws—were true.
The interview was recorded in secret on November 5, and aired two weeks later, making headlines for Diana’s revelations about her own extramarital affair, her comments about Charles’s fitness to become king, and the role Camilla Parker-Bowles played in the dissolution of her marriage. The more outlandish claims that Bashir used to pursue the interview are not mentioned.
When Wiessler noticed the similarity of the documents he made to a separate Bashir investigation that had prompted a libel case, he approached two of his supervisors at the BBC in the weeks after the Diana interview aired, he told the Mail last week, to tell them about all the forgeries he made for Bashir. Then news director Tony Hall began an investigation into Bashir’s behavior, and approached Diana to participate. In this year’s ITV documentary, Wiessler said he was eventually fired and was the “fall guy” for the affair. When news of the Diana forgeries became public in April 1996, the Guardian reported the BBC had accused staff members of “participating in a smear campaign” against Bashir by leaking the documents to the press.
It was a handwritten note from Diana that eventually cleared Bashir back in 1995, which claimed that the forged documents did not affect her decision to participate in the interview. But when representatives for the BBC went back to their files to search for Diana’s note in October 2020, it had disappeared. All that remained was the investigation report that described it. “Suggesting that mocked-up documents were genuine was wrong then and it’s wrong now; the BBC of today is happy to apologize for this,” the BBC’s director-general Tim Davie said late last month. “This would not happen today.”
Despite the investigations, Bashir remained on good terms with the higher-ups at the BBC. He left in 1999 and moved to America, where he eventually became known for the 2003 news documentary Living With Michael Jackson, which challenged the pop star about allegations of abuse and what really went on at Neverland. He returned to the BBC in 2016, to serve as their religious affairs correspondent, but is currently on leave as he recovers from a quadruple bypass and a case of COVID-19; the BBC has said he is “unable to discuss any of this.” In one final twist, however, he was photographed last Friday leaving a restaurant with bags in hand—not exactly bedridden or rendered mute by illness.
There is no question that Bashir forged the documents, a severe breach of journalistic ethics then and now. But how much others within the BBC knew, and when they knew it, is what’s causing the current internal strife. “It was known, within a relatively tight circle, what he was up to at the time. It didn’t sit comfortably with anyone,” an insider told the Telegraph last week. “For Hall, who knew everything, to allow him back to the BBC is quite something.” Hall moved up from his position directing news and eventually served as the director-general of the BBC for seven years until his retirement in September 2020.
While Diana is no longer around to accept the broadcaster’s apology, a full accounting of the run-up to the Panorama interview could help the entire British media come to terms with the habits and precedents that inform their coverage of the royal family. When Harry first announced his and Meghan’s decision to sue various tabloids, he movingly described the connection to what he saw in the 1990s and what is happening today. “I’ve seen what happens when someone I love is commoditized to the point that they are no longer treated or seen as a real person,” he said. “I lost my mother and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces.”
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