The Crown: What You Didn’t Know About Lady Diana’s Controversial Interview with Martin Mashir

To tell you the truth, I think season 5 of The Crown has been the weakest to date: yes, it has deepened the gap that separated Lady Diana from the British monarchy, but I have the feeling that progress has been made rather little in history. In any case, due to the historical period that the season covers, there are great moments like Lady Diana’s interview with Martin Mashir that have been recreated and that force us to ask ourselves about everything that is behind them.

The seventh episode of The Crown‘s fifth season doesn’t open with Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles or Princess Diana, or any other member of the royal family dominating most of the season’s screen time. Instead, it opens with an eager BBC reporter named Martin Bashir. Despite his efforts, the show he’s working on, an investigative documentary series called Panorama, isn’t getting the traction he wants. A ray of hope arises when she hears a rumour that the Princess of Wales, spurred on by Charles of England’s recent interview with Jonathan Dimbleby in which her husband admitted to adultery, wants to share her version of the story of her. But how can she surpass far more famous and accomplished journalists like Oprah Winfrey and Diane Sawyer?

Lying and manipulating, suggests the series. Season five of The Crown includes for the first time a scene in which Bashir asks a graphic designer to forge bank documents that imply that Diana’s staff are leaking information to Carlos and the royal family. As the episode progresses, Bashir shows it to Diana’s brother, who passes it on to the already immensely paranoid Lady Di. She agrees to speak and ends up stripping down in a televised interview with Bashir, admitting to suicidal thoughts and bulimia and uttering a damning line about Carlos and Camilla Parker Bowles: “Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so I was a bit saturated.”

The Crown is known for exaggerating history. But in the case of the infamous TV show ‘An Interview with HRH the Princess of Wales’, what is historically proven and what is just histrionics? For decades, Bashir’s 1995 interview was considered a journalistic triumph. Immediately after it aired, it dominated network television and newspaper headlines around the world. (Although reactions were mixed: ‘The fury of a jilted princess’ ran the headline in The Daily Telegraph the next day, while the Chicago Sun-Times called the affair ‘pretty bland’.) Bashir and producer Mike Robinson would go on to receive the BAFTA Award for Best Talk Show in 1996, described by many as one of the firsts of the century.

Hidden in plain sight? The deeply problematic means by which it was achieved. In 2020, following years of whispers and protests over Bashir’s alleged unethical behaviour, the BBC appointed former UK Supreme Court Justice, the Honorable Lord Dyson, to lead a formal inquiry. He wrote the Dyson report: The exhaustive 127-page investigative document outlines how Bashir manipulated the Spencer family in the interview, and his subsequent attempts to cover up doing so. The BBC published the results in 2021.

This Is What Dyson Discovered

In 1995, Bashir was a relatively young BBC reporter. The chain had other names in mind at first to interview the iconic princess amid her tumultuous marriage. In 1993, Diana’s private secretary, Major Patrick Jephson, was contacted to ask if she was interested in speaking with veteran broadcaster Sue Lawley. He declined the offer.

But Bashir, intrigued by the stories surrounding the British monarchy, was willing to go to any length to secure access. First, as shown on the show, he asked a freelance graphic designer for the network to create a fake bank statement suggesting that Earl Spencer’s (Diana’s brother) security guard, Alan Waller, had received payments from both the British press and shady companies abroad in exchange for leaking information about the Spencer family. Not knowing the true context, the graphic designer agreed. In early September, Bashir showed the fake documents to Count Spencer.

Soon after, Bashir showed the Count the second set of bank statements that were even more damning. They claimed that Commander Richard Aylard, Prince Charles’s private secretary, and Jephson were receiving secret payments from shady sources in the Channel Islands. (Unlike Waller’s excerpts, which Bashir himself – as well as the graphic designer – eventually confirmed were completely fabricated, Dyson could find no concrete evidence that Jephson’s and Aylard’s were also false. However, he considered that it was probable that – they were created by Mr. Bashir and that the information they supposedly contained was fabricated by him). The earl called the BBC television network to vouch for Bashir’s credibility. They did it.

Spencer immediately alerted her sister to Bashir’s conclusions. Alarmed, Diana accepted an introduction. Next, she arranged a meeting between the reporter and the most famous woman in the world: “It was to prepare me so that I could then get to Diana for the interview that she had always secretly sought,” Spencer told Dyson about the documents.

Diana and Bashir met on September 19. Dyson believes Bashir took advantage of her deep paranoia: “Princess Diana had paranoid fears about several things, including that she was being spied on and that her life was in danger,” Dyson wrote. ‘Mr Bashir would have had little difficulty playing on her fears and paranoia.’ That some darker forces were trying to get rid of her or hurt her so they could declare that she was ‘unbalanced’. One particular fear is that she was done through a car accident, as a preplanned brake failure. (According to notes of the meeting taken by Earl Spencer at the time, there was talk of the possibility that his car and phone lines were tapped, and that senior police officers made money off illegally obtained information.

Earl Spencer, who made the presentation between his sister and the journalist, began to notice inconsistencies that appeared during the meeting. Spencer says that Bashir originally told Diana that she was being watched by MI6 (the British equivalent of the CIA). But he had told Spencer that he was MI5 (the equivalent of the FBI). ‘I also felt, in this meeting, that I was listening to a man who was not telling the truth. Spencer told Dyson: ‘The truth is that the things he had said to me during our meetings in Althorp didn’t fit with what he was saying to Diana now.’ Bashir denies all this: ‘I think much of this is probably fabricated, and as for the claim that it was written contemporaneously, for all these pages to have been the subject of that meeting – my recollection, that meeting was quite abrupt and quite short. Dyson replies: ‘I am convinced that Mr Bashir said most, if not all,

Diana decided to go ahead with the interview. The interview revealed one bombshell after another. She admitted to self-harm. ‘I inflicted myself. I did not like it. I was embarrassed because I couldn’t take the pressure’, ‘an eating disorder I had bulimia for several years’ and an affair with James Hewitt (‘I was in love with him’). Viewership figures for the 20 November 1995 broadcast amounted to some 23 million people, nearly half the UK population at the time.

Almost immediately, alarm bells about the interview began to sound for some of those involved. The graphic designer, realizing the purpose of the fake bank statements, raised his concerns with senior officials at the BBC. Top executives confronted Bashir in December 1995. He admitted making them up but said he had never shown them to Diana, a position he has continued to hold. He even produced a note written by Diana herself: “Martin Bashir did not show me any documents or give me any information that I did not previously know,” she wrote. “I consented to the interview on Panorama without any undue pressure and I have no regrets.” (Dyson believes this letter to be authentic.)

Other newspaper reporters also sensed something suspicious. In March 1996, The Mail on Sunday, tipped off by the graphic designer, wrote to Earl Spencer asking him to comment on an article about Bashir’s forged documents. He declined to comment, as he did not want to undermine his sister’s interview. So, The Mail on Sunday contacted the BBC. When the BBC questioned Bashir again about the allegations, he eventually admitted that he had shown the documents to Lord Spencer. However, Bashir was never officially reprimanded, nor did he publicly confess to any wrongdoing. Lord Dyson believes that, at this point, the network began to ‘cover up’.

On 7th April 1996, The Mail on Sunday published an explosive article: ‘Diana’s man on the BBC and the fake bank statements, but without the BBC admitting to anything or Spencer commenting, they could not prove that he or Diana they would have seen them. The story faded over time.

It wasn’t until almost 25 years later, in October 2020, that two Sunday Times reporters finally cracked the case: ‘It was hailed as the greatest revealing interview of the 20th century, but 25 years after Diana, Princess of Wales stripped his soul on Panorama, fresh allegations have surfaced that the BBC got the scoop under a pretence and using fake bank statements,’ they wrote. ‘Martin Bashir, the journalist who interviewed Diana in 1995 after the collapse of her marriage to Prince Charles, has also been accused of exploiting the princess’s fears that their private conversations were being tapped by secret services to get a meeting. secret’. Amid the outrage, this generated in the wider British press,

Following the publication of Dyson’s damning report in May 2021, the BBC admitted its poor performance and apologized to Prince William, Prince Harry, Prince Charles, Jephson, Earl Spencer and the graphic designer. The network also agreed to pay damages to former babysitter Tiggy Legge Bourke after Bashir falsely suggested that she had been having an affair with Prince Charles. Other deals were made with Jephson, Waller, and the graphic designer.

Diana’s children, in their public statements, expressed their anger: “It is my firm opinion that this Panorama program has no legitimacy and should not be rebroadcast.” It effectively established a false narrative which, for more than a quarter of a century, has been marketed by the BBC and others,’ Prince William said. Harry blamed him for her mother’s death: ‘She was resilient, brave and unquestionably honest. The ripple effect of a culture of exploitation and unethical practices ended her life.’

The Network Returned All the Awards the Interview Received, Including The BAFTA

Bashir maintains his position that the bank statements did not influence Diana to participate in the interview: ‘I apologized then, and I apologize now, for having asked for the bank statements to be falsified. It was stupid and it was an action I deeply regret,’ he said in a statement after the results were published. “I also reiterate that the bank statements had no bearing on Princess Diana‘s personal decision to participate in the interview.”

He added: ‘Indeed, despite his other conclusions, Lord Dyson himself agrees in any event that the princess would probably have agreed to be interviewed without what he describes as my ‘intervention’.’ There’s a lot of talk about The Crown exaggerating history and damaging the reputation of the royal family in the process. But this episode may do the opposite: inform its wide audience of the true and previously unknown methods used to secure this questionable interview with information that has only recently come to light.