Twenty-seven years ago this summer, Earl Spencer received a letter on BBC Panorama writing paper from Martin Bashir, a man he’d never heard of, requesting to see him. In this letter, Martin Bashir reassured him by stating that he had senior coworkers at the BBC that would vouch for him.
He said that at the time he was reporting for NBC, the American network, and they frequently worked alongside the BBC, who were their new partners, and that he had the greatest admiration for the BBC and knew Panorama to be its flagship programme.
He said that he and Martin Bashir had their first meeting on August 31, 1995. Two years later, to the day, his youngest sister would be dead, killed in a car wreck, with no royal protection officers on hand, having chosen to dispense with the services of those who she should have been able to rely upon implicitly with her safety.
What Martin Bashir told him was incredible. A string of stories so remarkable that, as soon as he left, he called Panorama’s executive producer, who confirmed it was all true and that he could trust Mr Bashir.
Over the following three weeks he felt that he was being groomed. He was shown falsified bank statements. He was told of underhand payments, spying and of gross deception, but all along, it was he who was being deceived in order for Martin Bashir to get to his late sister, via him.
At this time, Diana was particularly vulnerable. She was discovering that some of her secrets, shared only with close friends, were emerging in the press, and she was understandably intimidated by this, and looking back, he suspects she was a very early target of phone hacking by unidentified perpetrators, but nobody knew about this illegal practice in 1995, so she was accepting of the absurd insistence that dark forces were at work.
On September 19, 1995, Earl Spencer introduced Diana to Martin Bashir. In that meeting, he was struck by a number of discrepancies between what he’d told his late sister and what Martin Bashir had told him previously, and after he left he said to his sister that he’d wasted her time and apologised to her and that what Martin Bashir had said didn’t add up, and he highlighted some of the differences with what Martin had told him before, but she just said it was okay and that it was lovely to see him anyhow.
When he parted that afternoon, he assumed he’d never hear anything about Martin Bashir again, but when the BBC touted that they’d secured their Panorama interview with his sister, a few weeks later, it was the first he knew of anything that had resulted from that uneasy meeting.
He said that while Martin Bashir is, of course, upheld for his unspeakable conduct, serious questions remain about others at the BBC. First, who else at the BBC knew of Mr Bashir’s work at the time?
In a story of such extraordinary importance as this, it’s reasonable to assume that the chain of command must have gone extremely high indeed, beyond Panorama to the upper reaches of the BBC, but when there was what the BBC termed an inquiry into the matter in the spring of 1996, into how the interview was procured, senior managers in the BBC knew that Earl Spencer was the go-between that introduced Diana to their correspondent, yet they decided not to let Earl Spencer know of the investigation at all, so who, therefore, decided not to approach him for proof? Why did they not want to hear it? And who were they covering for?
Diana was a naive young lady, looking for a fairytale marriage to a Prince, as so many do, and who sadly found out the hard way how extremely powerful these families can be and how they do things, and this was an extremely tragic story indeed.
And never has anyone been so misunderstood as Diana was. She was a remarkable person, with bags of appeal, but was subjected to a hate campaign fuelled by many of the Royal Family, and how Martin Bashir can live with himself I actually don’t know. He told lies to someone who obviously needed support, and she was suffering, but the BBC caused some of that, although how much will never be fully known, but Diana was a beautiful soul, and gone too soon.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 