Did BBC deliberately try to mislead me? Did they lie to me, just as their reporter Martin Bashir lied to Princess Diana to get her to pour her heart out to the nation in the now notorious Panorama programme back in 1995?
All I can say is that, in my 20-year pursuit of the corporation to find the truth about who had known what and when about Bashir’s deceptions, there were many incriminating internal documents I asked to see that mysteriously went missing.
Of course there could have been completely innocent reasons. Perhaps they simply wafted away through an open window. Or fell behind a radiator. Perhaps they were eaten by mice.
But fortunately for me (though not for them) one crucial document survived – an eight-page memorandum, composed by Anne Sloman, the acting head of weekly programmes.
It was dated April 22, 1996, five months after the programme was broadcast – a time when Bashir was under internal scrutiny.
He had been interrogated by Sloman and Tony Hall, head of news and current affairs, in what Hall would later describe as a ‘tough encounter’ as he and Sloman ‘pushed Bashir hard on the details because we were very concerned he had lied to the BBC’.
Under pressure, Bashir eventually crumbled and admitted, yes, he had lied about what he’d done with the forged documents he’d ordered from a BBC graphic artist.
‘By the end of the meeting,’ Hall reported, ‘Bashir was in tears and came across as completely remorseful.’
The Martin Bashir interview with Princess Diana in 1995 which used mock up bank statements to get her speak
Andy Webb tells in devastating detail how the Martin Bashir scandal cannot have come at a worse time for the beleaguered BBC
Diana’s brother Ear Spencer, pictured last year, took his story to the Daily Mail. ‘EARL SPENCER: BBC’S VILE SLURS TO ENTRAP DIANA’ was the front-page headline
He and Sloman accepted that Bashir was sorry, believing he was telling them the truth. Later, it would transpire that during that tearful interview he had been trotting out still more lies, which Hall and Sloman, despite being among the most senior and highly paid journalists in the UK, did not spot.
And so, apart from Sloman writing her memo – which ended with the chilling observation that ‘the Diana story is probably now dead, unless [Charles] Spencer talks’ – they did nothing. The small knot of senior BBC executives charged with managing the scandal thought they had weathered the storm.
But one critical encounter was still looming. The final test would be a meeting of the BBC Board of Governors the following week. The task of addressing the 12 men and women – two lords, three knights, business titans, academics – in the ornate council chamber of New Broadcasting House fell to Hall.
He had prepared notes for the meeting, which I was finally able to extract from the BBC after a long, drawn-out battle using the Freedom of Information Act. What these notes leave out is as instructive as what they actually say.
Hall – who at this point knew beyond doubt that Bashir had passed off his forgeries to Charles Spencer as genuine documents, had lied about doing so three times, but then been forced to confess – drew up a statement in preparation for the governors’ meeting saying not that, but something else instead: ‘I have talked to Martin, and others involved, and I am satisfied of the following points: the graphic had no part whatsoever in gaining the interview with the Princess of Wales.
‘I have talked to Martin at length about his reasons for compiling the graphic: he has none, other than he wasn’t thinking.
‘I believe he is, even with his lapse, honest and an honourable man. He is contrite.’
Hall then went on to demonstrate to the governors that, having satisfied himself about Bashir’s honesty, tough action would be taken regarding someone else.
Diana and the then-Prince Charles pictured in 1991 in Toronto, Canada
Princess Di – pictured in Liverpool in November 1995
Matt Wiessler would be blacklisted: ‘We are taking steps to ensure that the graphic designer involved – Matthew Wiessler – will not work for the BBC again.’ It was Wiessler who had blown the whistle on Bashir’s duplicity in an article in The Mail on Sunday and now, shamefully, he was the one person made to carry the can.
This was when the whole truth might have been told. But it was not. The BBC governors were the people appointed to keep an eye on the men and women who actually made the TV and radio programmes. But these watchdogs did not growl, much less bite.
Of the 12 governors present on that Thursday morning the chairman Sir Christopher Bland and three others are dead. The youngest survivor, now aged 81, is the distinguished theatre director Sir Richard Eyre, who years later confirmed: ‘The fact that Bashir lied should have been made clear to us, but it never was.’
I asked Sir Richard what the result would have been had Hall told the whole truth about what he knew: that Bashir had commissioned forged documents, passed them off as genuine to Spencer and then lied about his actions.
Sir Richard’s reply was unequivocal: ‘There is no question that the governors would have insisted on a full-scale inquiry had they been aware of the circumstances.’
An inquiry would eventually take place but not for another quarter of a century, by which time the interview’s damage had been done and Diana was dead, having shrugged off her royal protection team and foolishly put her security in the hands of playboy Dodi Fayed, with fatal consequences. And so the intervention of this former BBC governor is crucial.
Here is confirmation that had Hall not covered up what he knew in April 1996, then Charles Spencer would have been alerted to Bashir’s duplicity. In turn, Diana would almost certainly have received a briefing on the hoax that had been perpetrated – and history would undoubtedly have been different.
It is that realisation which today members of Diana’s family find maddening and utterly heartbreaking.
Charles and Diana in 1985
Princess Di in November 1995
Diana during the interview
Curiously, there is another person who complains he was not told the whole truth at the earliest opportunity – the director-general John Birt. He was emphatic that he had not been briefed by Hall on Bashir’s lying.
This was the same John Birt who had a close relationship with Hall and had messaged him before the board meeting reminding him that they ‘needed to be clear about the matters we have been discussing’.
Later, in evidence to a House of Commons committee, Birt (by then Lord Birt, having been ennobled) said he was never made aware of Bashir’s deceptions at the time and was ‘greatly shocked’ when he was eventually told.
But in the words of an unimpeachable source, who was in the room when Birt was briefed on the scandal: ‘It was impossible for him to know nothing of Bashir’s lies.’
Birt’s extraordinary testimony also asks us to accept that he remained ignorant of vital matters already known and extensively discussed among other senior BBC executives.
It is clear from Sloman’s memo that behind the scenes at the BBC, for five months there was constant fire-fighting as details seemed likely to burst into the public domain.
It seems odd Birt would have missed this, especially given that he was a very hands-on DG, often criticised for micromanaging the most mundane aspects of BBC affairs.
We are also asked to believe that Hall, having learned the terrifying news that Panorama harboured a reporter who was both a forger and a serial liar, did not tell his boss and did not follow one of the basic tenets drilled into every BBC employee always to refer up.
But now the matter was all apparently resolved. At stake had been the very reputation of the BBC. If it had come clean and admitted that the Diana interview on Panorama – its prestige current affairs programme since 1953 and the world’s longest-running television news magazine – had been obtained by deception, not only would heads have rolled but trust in the whole organisation would have been seriously undermined, perhaps never to recover.
To protect itself, the BBC took the decision to protect Bashir, a man they knew to be a liar. With a collective sigh of relief, the management team handling the crisis could put the whole scandal to bed and hope it would never arise again.
But it did arise again, and of its own making. In 2005, the BBC had apparently put aside any lingering misgivings about the Panorama interview and commissioned a special documentary to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the original broadcast. It seems to have been prompted by an unquenchable desire for certain BBC bosses to relive what they still believed was their finest hour.
It was a rash decision. Sloman had ended her memo back in 1996 describing the Diana story as dead with the proviso, ‘unless Spencer talks’, referring to Charles Spencer, who could settle once and for all what Bashir had told him and shown him.
A decade earlier he had chosen to say nothing. Now his moment had come. Asked to take part in the documentary, he wrote back in a letter he copied to the director-general, Mark Thompson: ‘I cannot believe that you’re celebrating such an appalling moment in the BBC’s history. Panorama’s role was less than honest, the interview was obtained by dishonesty and I have all the documentary evidence to prove that.’
Thompson – a hot shot who had been brought to the BBC by Birt – did not respond.
He says today that the letter never reached his desk. But Spencer has been able to prove that his letter received serious consideration within the BBC. A stamp showed it was classed as ‘Governance and Accountability Correspondence’. But still he got the brush-off.
Had Thompson or the documentary makers responded in 2005, then the hoaxing of Diana would have been revealed at a much earlier date. It would also probably have taken its toll on the careers of several people then still in powerful positions.
Hall’s later appointment as BBC director-general – and elevation to the House of Lords in 2010 to sit alongside his old boss Lord Birt – would have been very unlikely.
Despite Spencer’s objections, the documentary The Princess And Panorama went ahead. It was an extraordinary bit of film-making in which Hall described Bashir as ‘the sort of interviewer people trust’. Bashir, though, was a notable absence in the celebratory line-up.
The documentary, though, did have the effect of renewing my own interest in the case.
There had been a number of carefully sourced and authoritative books exploring how Bashir had obtained the interview, the forgeries and so on. It seemed to me astonishing that this information was so glaringly in the public domain and that nobody seemed to care.
How had Bashir not been collared and brought to account?
So I put a new set of questions to the BBC, requesting under the Freedom of Information Act details of Hall and Sloman’s questioning of Bashir. The BBC replied that it did not hold the information I’d asked for.
Yet it is beyond doubt that it did have detailed notes, minutes and reports on all of this, including
Sloman’s eight-page memo detailing the complete process. A copy sits on my desk right now. But if the BBC has decided simply to lie, what can one do?
Over the following years I continued to build up a research file, a little bit here, a bit there. It seemed, though, that Bashir had acquired what I call ‘protective notoriety’ – where a famous person tainted with scandal manages to prevent the full story emerging, as with Jimmy Savile, for example.
But eventually the Bashir time bomb, which since 1995 had been ever so quietly ticking, burst in a thunderous detonation in 2020. It was 25 years now since the iconic interview and, to mark the anniversary, three documentaries were being made about it, including one by me for Channel 4.
I knew there were many among the BBC staff who had witnessed the cover-up of the Bashir scandal over the years and been appalled. They were incensed that this proven scoundrel had been eased into a highly paid job.
I tipped off the Sunday Times about this unrest and its reporters managed to establish from Charles Spencer that Bashir had shown him the forged bank statements. After years of denials, the BBC finally admitted this was true.
Again I pressed the BBC to release all the documents it had on the affair, particularly about that meeting where Bashir had confessed to Hall and Sloman. I was told now that it had the relevant documents – which it had denied when I first asked 13 years earlier – but would not release them.
It was stalemate. The BBC accepted that there were documents showing that Bashir was a serial liar but it decided not to reveal them, instead giving every indication still that everything that had gone on was above board.
Then, finally, the organisation appeared to decide to help me with my documentary, admittedly in a somewhat sly way.
At 12.58pm on Monday, October 19, 2020, a BBC employee sent me an email, in a plan thrashed out by the corporation’s top-most managers and lawyers. What they did not know was that this email would plunge the BBC into the greatest crisis in its 100-year history.
The email comprised a five-page covering letter, but intriguingly also a separate PDF file. Sixty-seven pages of documents, scanned from internal BBC memos and reports a quarter of a century old, many marked ‘confidential’.
As I began to flip through the documents I was puzzled. What had I now been sent and why? It was when I reached page 43 that I stopped dead. What was written there, partly obscured by heavy black redactions, was extraordinary. It could not be true.
It was a note prepared by Hall for his appearance before the BBC governors suggesting that it was Spencer who had shown Bashir the controversial bank documents and not the other way round.
At that board meeting on April 25, 1996, Hall had apparently pointed the finger at Spencer, assuring 12 of the country’s great and good that he had helped Bashir produce the forgeries. And now the BBC felt confident enough, 24 years later, to brief me in the expectation that I would in turn let the world know in my documentary.
I put the allegation to Spencer who, when I had last approached him two months earlier, to ask if he would take part in my documentary, had politely declined. His reaction to the screenshot I sent him of the redacted email was explosive. He was outraged. ‘I did no such thing.’ The BBC was lying.
Over the next 40 minutes on the phone, Spencer unfolded the full amazing story.
Quoting precise dates and timings, he told me how Martin Bashir had spoken of a plot by Prince Charles to murder not only Diana but the rest of the Spencer family too; the lies about Charles having an affair with Tiggy Legge-Bourke, that Diana’s private secretary Patrick Jephson was working for MI5, that she was bugged and followed, that the whole world was plotting against her.
He was reading from notes he had himself recorded at that extraordinary first meeting between Bashir and Diana in September 1995 – the one in which Diana had been mesmerised into thinking she was indeed the victim of a conspiracy and would therefore allow Bashir to interview her.
When I came off the phone, I had conflicting stories about those forged bank statements and opposite accounts about from where the forged bank statements had come – one from the BBC, and one from Spencer. Both were sensational but they couldn’t both be true. I had to choose which one to use in the documentary I was about to finish and air.
Common sense told me that, if Spencer had indeed done what the BBC claimed, he would now surely just be lying low, ignoring my approach to him? That’s what you’d do if you had a secret to hide.
So I went with my gut. The story from Lord Hall’s report was not true. Earl Spencer’s story was.
My expectation was that, when my documentary was aired, the BBC would have no choice but to launch a full public inquiry.
But even when I told them in detail the astonishing background story – all the lies that Charles Spencer had heard Bashir telling Diana – the BBC responded: ‘The BBC does not intend to take further action on events which happened 25 years ago.’
Once again, it was circling the wagons and hoping to get away with it.
But Spencer had had enough by now. He went directly to the BBC to report what Bashir had done and in a letter to the then director-general Tim Davie, urged it to investigate.
He wrote: ‘It is astounding to me that I was not contacted at that time, so that senior figures in the BBC could hear my version of events. It leads me to suspect that the truth was not being sought.’
Spencer’s email was truly chilling stuff, the sort to which the only appropriate response is, ‘Stay right there. I’m coming over!’ Instead, the reply came a day and a half later. It said: ‘Dear Charles, Thank you for the email, I wanted to confirm receipt. I will get a response back to you over the coming days. Best regards, Tim.’
But Spencer was not so easily put off. More emails followed back and forth in the coming days, until he got a full response. Gone was the chummy tone of ‘Tim’s’ previous notes. This 900-word email bore every sign of having been composed by a team of BBC lawyers.
If it was an attempt to silence the increasingly furious Spencer, it would fail, dramatically. Davie had written: ‘Unfortunately, the account you give does not accord with the account that Mr Bashir gave the BBC at the time.’
Excuse me? Was that the same Mr Bashir who had lied to the BBC – not once but three times – about these events in 1996? It was, but Mr Bashir’s story was apparently easier for Davie to swallow than the story being told to him now by Princess Diana’s brother.
For Spencer, that was it. Now the gloves would come off. He said to me: ‘It was outrageous. It’s absolutely clear that they thought if they could just see me off till after the 25th anniversary of the programme, they could get away with it. When they made it clear they weren’t going to help, I thought, ‘Well, it’s got to come out.’
Spencer took his story to the Daily Mail. ‘EARL SPENCER: BBC’S VILE SLURS TO ENTRAP DIANA’ was the front-page headline, followed by page after page of detail inside. Here at last was the evidence about Bashir which Spencer had patiently offered to bring to the BBC, time and again, privately, in a grown-up way.
And so – at last – the BBC sprang into action. Davie offered a meeting with Spencer. But it was too late to stop the Press onslaught led by the Daily Mail.
Inside the BBC bunker a crisis group were huddled virtually, linked by email, as the press office pinged each of them a ghastly screenshot of the latest Daily Mail story. One commented: ‘These front pages are like a parallel universe where it’s still the 1990s.’
But no they weren’t. Those revelations about Bashir’s entrapment of Diana never did make front page news in the 1990s. Because he had got away with it. The BBC had covered up for him.
After seven days’ brutal pounding, the BBC could take no more. Buckling under the intense pressure, the decision was finally taken inside the organisation to find out exactly how Diana was hoaxed into giving her Panorama interview 25 years ago.
Yes, there would be an inquiry.
Davie announced: ‘The BBC is determined to get to the truth about these events and that is why we have commissioned an independent investigation. Lord Dyson is an eminent and highly respected figure who will lead a thorough process.’
But was Dyson that thorough? Did he get to the whole truth? I don’t think so – as I will explain in tomorrow’s Daily Mail.
Adapted from Dianarama by Andy Webb (Michael Joseph, £22), to be published November 20. © Andy Webb 2025. To order a copy for £19.80 (offer valid to 22/11/2025; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
