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

Thirty years after the broadcast of the most infamous interview in BBC history, a new book looks at what led to Martin Bashir's deception of Diana, Princess of Wales and how the BBC reacted afterwards.

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

Former Panorama reporter Bashir secured the interview with Diana in 1995 after showing her brother faked bank statements that suggested people close to the princess were being paid by the security service MI5.

The book says Earl Spencer, Diana's brother, did not at first criticise Bashir over the interview because he did not want to say anything that would question Diana's decision to speak to him.

"To come out as a strong critic of Bashir would have been in effect to paint his sister as a gullible fool," writes Webb. "Far better to say nothing than to open a family rift."

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

Webb had received documents from the BBC under freedom of information rules about the then-director of BBC News Tony Hall's report to the BBC's governors.

They suggested that, rather than Bashir showing bank statements to Earl Spencer, the earl had shown the statements to Bashir.

The earl then made an angry 40-minute phone call to Webb on the morning the Channel 4 documentary was being shown on TV, outlining for the first time how he had been given the statements and a number of other outlandish allegations by Bashir.

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

A press release from the book's publishers says it has been written with "full support from Charles Spencer".

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

Webb writes in his book that Bashir was "pathologically, compellingly charming. Ruthless."

After the interview, Bashir went on to work for ITV and US broadcasters. He returned to the BBC as religion editor in 2016, and resigned from the corporation because of ill health in 2021, shortly before the publication of a highly critical report about his behaviour by the former Supreme Court justice Lord Dyson.

Lord Hall - who went on to become director general of the BBC - was judged by Lord Dyson in 2021 to have conducted an investigation into Bashir that had been "woeful and ineffective".

Webb says that, had he given the full truth to the BBC governors in 1996, the "consequences for Diana can only be guessed at".

A BBC spokesperson said the corporation had accepted Lord Dyson's findings in full and publicly apologised 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 acknowledged that the BBC investigation into Bashir in 1996 "failed to meet the standards that were required".

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

The book also suggests that the Prince of Wales is "taking steps to discover" the truth about Martin Bashir's interview.

Prince William strongly criticised BBC managers after Lord Dyson's report, saying they "looked the other way, rather than asking tough questions".

He said the interview had been a major contribution to the worsening of his parents' relationship and contributed significantly to her fear, paranoia and isolation before she died.

The book contains a warning to the BBC from an unnamed source who says William is an "implacable antagonist" and "has people on the case". Kensington Palace is not commenting on the book.

The freelance designer who was asked by Bashir to make the forged bank statements, Matt Wiessler, has since been paid compensation by the BBC and received an apology after he was banned from working for the corporation in 1996.

But the book reveals the personal guilt he felt after Princess Diana died in 1997 - to the extent that he joined the mourning crowds at Buckingham Palace.

"I was standing right by the gate at 4am because I felt very strongly that I did have a hand in it," Wiessler says.

And while a burglary at Wiessler's flat, targeting the floppy disks on which he had stored his unwitting forgeries, has been reported in the past, the book reveals that a thief left what the designer described as "[excrement] down my loo" for him to find.

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

He was inspired to create a documentary about the making of the Panorama interview, and discovered the story of the deception already in two books: a history of the Panorama programme and one of Andrew Morton's biographies of Diana.

The book also reveals that, at the time he started work on his own documentary, he was investigating the employer of his wife, Diana Martin, who was then the deputy editor of Panorama.

Ms Martin's father Christopher had in turn produced the 1994 ITV documentary with Jonathan Dimbleby in which Prince Charles confessed to adultery.

Without that programme, says Andy Webb, it is doubtful that Princess Diana would have agreed to talk with Bashir at all.