For the viewers who watched Princess Diana’s interview with Martin Bashir when it aired in November 1995, she was a fed-up woman ready to be reborn as something different. The people who knew her best saw something darker in her tense demeanor, and in the two decades after her death at 36 in August 1997, they have treated the interview as an inflection point for Diana, the beginning of a downward spiral with a tragic ending.
Now, more than 25 years later, the BBC has issued a public apology, not for the content of the interview itself, but for the way the interview was secured. On Thursday the BBC released the results of an investigation into the tactics Bashir used to secure the sit-down, as well as how the network failed to adequately respond when it was told in late 1995 that Bashir might have behaved unethically. Bashir, then a little-known reporter, became a star after the interview, and other journalists were confused about how he might have secured it. In the in-depth report, retired judge Lord John Dyson concludes that he likely got an introduction to the princess by showing false bank records to her brother, Charles, Earl Spencer.
In response, Prince William, Prince Harry, and Spencer all expressed gratitude for the investigation. But while Spencer honored his sister’s memory by sharing a photograph, and Harry maintained that the situation and other depredations by the media led to her death, it was William who made the strongest statement about the interview itself.
“It is my firm view that this Panorama program holds no legitimacy and should never be aired again. It effectively established a false narrative which, for over a quarter of a century, has been commercialized by the BBC and others,” he said in a statement. “It brings indescribable sadness to know that the BBC’s failures contributed significantly to her fear, paranoia, and isolation that I remember from those final years with her.”
In the aftermath, The Mail on Sunday reported that Prince Charles feels similarly. “There is time needed to think about this, but there is a feeling that the BBC shouldn’t be showing any footage at all from the interview,” a source close to Charles told the newspaper. A friend of Charles’s told The Sun that the BBC’s contrition means the public should be skeptical of the interview altogether. “The narrative that came from that interview about Charles needs to be changed,” the friend said. “He is privately furious that it has taken 27 years. The interview and allegations caused long-term damage to the future king and his household.”
We’ll never know how much of what Diana revealed in the interview—about her bulimia, Charles’s infidelity, and her doubt that he could handle being king—would have come to light even without Bashir’s shady tactics. Dyson wrote in his report that, by the time Bashir arranged the interview in 1995, “it is clear that Princess Diana was now very keen to talk to the BBC.” But by forging bank statements to make it seem as if members of her staff were being paid to spy on her and leak her private information, Bashir triggered that “fear, paranoia, and isolation” that William described in his statement.
And strangest of all, Bashir’s claims that Diana was being spied on were not part of the final interview. That’s the point that seems to have vexed management at the BBC when they first investigated Bashir’s conduct in 1996. If the claims weren’t a part of the show, why did Bashir fake the bank statements? According to Bashir, he didn’t intend to use them in the show. In his interview with Dyson, he said, “It was a foolish thing to do.”
Looking back decades later, it’s impossible to deny that at least some of what she shared with Bashir in that interview would have come out eventually. Now that Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, have been married for 16 years, it’s obvious that Diana’s pithy comment that “there were three of us in this marriage” had to be based in fact. Some of the revelations about her eating disorder and difficulties during her first pregnancy had already been revealed in Andrew Morton’s 1992 biography, Diana: Her True Story, written with the help of tapes Diana recorded in secret.
Because the timing and severity of the interview itself complicated her relationship with the royals so profoundly, it’s hard to deny its negative impact on Diana, whose worst fears about the royal family were seemingly confirmed by Bashir’s deception. Her private secretary Patrick Jephson, who was not involved in securing the interview and only found out about it a week ahead of time, left his position not long after the interview aired. According to The Telegraph, Jephson wasn’t the only person to distance themselves from the princess; over the course of the next year, she became increasingly alienated from the people in her life. Eventually she would dismiss her official security for fear that they were “spies for the enemy camp,” according to Tina Brown, leaving her with a less cautious private guard on the night of her death.
So is William right that the interview should never be aired again? It depends on how comfortable we are with letting Diana’s frustration and darkness coexist with her light. It’s hard not to imagine a version of the interview that balanced her enthusiasm for charitable work alongside her personal revelations—which, according to Dyson’s report, is what a separate BBC journalist had originally inquired about before Bashir took on the story.
But the interview, even with everything we know now, remains a stunning look at a woman in so much pain that she is ready to burn it all down. Her power in that moment had nothing to do with Bashir.
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