Panorama

Yesterday, the BBC published Lord Dyson’s report into its 1995 Panorama interview with Princess Diana, and Panorama broadcast its own account of the controversy. John Dyson, a former Justice of the UK Supreme Court, was commissioned by the BBC to conduct an independent investigation into how journalist Martin Bashir secured his extraordinary interview with Diana.

Bashir has never spoken publicly about Diana; a BBC2 Arena documentary marking the interview’s tenth anniversary included contributions from everyone involved, except Bashir. In 1996, The Mail on Sunday reported that he showed fake bank statements to Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, in order to gain access to her. The BBC denied the Mail on Sunday report, and the story was forgotten until the interview’s twenty-fifth anniversary last year, when the BBC’s three terrestrial rivals all broadcast their own investigations into Bashir and the bank statements.

Dyson’s report describes Bashir as “unreliable and, in some cases, dishonest”. It also criticises the BBC’s 1996 internal investigation into the matter as “woefully ineffective”, as BBC management did not attempt to corroborate Bashir’s denials and did not make its findings public. The BBC demonstrated greater transparency yesterday, with the Dyson report and the Panorama broadcast, though Bashir had been a senior BBC journalist until his resignation last week, and the Panorama programme’s transmission had been delayed for five days.

Yesterday’s Panorama episode—Princess Diana, Martin Bashir and the BBC—marked the BBC’s first public criticism of Bashir, and it pulled no punches: “Martin Bashir spun a web of elaborate lies... Martin Bashir’s reputation lies in ruins”. (And that was before the opening titles.) Aside from the bank statements, Dyson and Panorama provide another key document: Charles Spencer’s notes from the initial meeting he arranged between Bashir and Diana. These notes (published yesterday by The Daily Telegraph) show how Bashir undermined Diana’s trust in her senior staff by feeding her outlandish conspiracy theories that, according to a public statement by Prince William, “contributed significantly to her fear, paranoia, and isolation”.