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Martin Bashir and Princess Diana: The BBC's latest entirely avoidable crisis
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Date: None

The headlines are all too familiar. The BBC has been exposed as having deeply unsatisfactory internal processes for investigating problems. Rival media organisations gloat over the inadequacies. Loyal BBC employees squirm with embarrassment. We have seen it all before.

The issue this time is the notorious interview with Princess Diana 25 years ago, conducted by Martin Bashir, a junior reporter on the BBC’s flagship weekly current affairs programme, Panorama. The interview attracted 23 million viewers. But a retired Supreme Court judge, Lord Dyson, has just issued a devastating verdict on how the interview was secured – indirectly, by deceit and trickery – and on how the internal inquiry into that deceit, once it was exposed, was handled – in a “woefully ineffective” fashion. Dyson came close to accusing the BBC of orchestrating a cover-up of Bashir’s misdeeds.

Dyson’s remit did not include two other relevant issues. First, why BBC managers chose to ignore their settled protocol on how to seek royal interviews. Second, why Bashir was re-hired by the BBC as a religious affairs correspondent long after the facts of his deception in obtaining the Diana interview had become known, not least to the man who had investigated his behaviour in 1995 and was BBC director-general at the time of Bashir’s return.

The first of these issues – bypassing established rules – was, at the time, treated as something of a triumph of enterprise over convention. For reasons never explained (and his death in 2017 leaves the questions unanswered), Steve Hewlett, the much-respected editor of Panorama in 1995, made two controversial decisions.

He agreed to let Bashir hijack a running discussion between the BBC and Buckingham Palace as to when and by whom Princess Diana might agree to be interviewed. (She was known to be keen to have her say; her husband had confessed to his adultery in an ITV programme one year earlier.) And Hewlett strongly vouched for Bashir when he managed to secure a meeting (on his own, with no producer present) with Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer. Bashir had presented Spencer with faked bank statements that suggested his former head of security was being secretly paid by a newspaper and the secret services. Spencer had phoned Hewlett to check Bashir’s credentials.

The faked documents and Bashir’s promise of further revelations about his staff were enough for Spencer to arrange a meeting between the reporter and his sister. Bashir reportedly regaled the brother and sister with dozens of bizarre, mostly invented stories of betrayal and espionage. Spencer started to regard Bashir as a fantasist and immediately cut off dealings with him. Diana, however, was persuaded that Bashir was a true friend. To maintain the sense of ‘us against the world’, Bashir arranged with Diana to film the interview in extreme secrecy. It proved to be an explosive encounter.

With his scoop in his bag, Bashir presented the BBC hierarchy with a dilemma: how much to say before transmission, and to whom. Rather than inform the Board of Governors of the interview (its chairman, Marmaduke Hussey was married to one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting), director-general John Birt kept them – and the Palace – in ignorance until just before transmission.

Whether or not disclosure might have risked losing the scoop, for whatever reason, became a moot point. But because of all the subterfuge involved, BBC management became all the more vulnerable when Matt Wiessler, the graphics artist who had been asked by Bashir to concoct the fake documents expressed concern. Wiessler raised the issue of whether he had been tricked into a deception with various senior people at Panorama. Hewlett’s reaction was to tell all who raised the matter with him to mind their own business.

[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/entirely-avoidable-catastrophe-yet-another-bbc-crisis/