Chapter Twenty-Five ‘The Opposite End of the Moral Spectrum’
Chapter Twenty-five
‘The opposite end of the moral spectrum’
It sounded urgent, so we met briefly a few evenings later. Bashir arrived with a cast-iron assurance, and – ironically, as it would turn out – intriguing tales of skulduggery.
I was used to people trying to get to Diana through me. They correctly assumed her brother must be one of her gatekeepers but did not appreciate how reluctant an opener of gates I tended to be.
When I worked as a TV reporter for the American network NBC out of their London bureau, Diana dropped by a couple of times, so we could go on to lunch together nearby.
I made sure that she did not talk to my colleagues there, beyond a polite ‘hello’, even though several of the journalists had become friends of mine.
I never wanted to risk her being compromised by people she met through me.
Even when my reporting job was complicated by my sister’s position, I became used to deflecting interest.
In the autumn of 1991 there were endless articles about the state of the Waleses’ relationship in the newspapers. Late that October I found myself giving a live top- and-tail from London’s Today Show offices, on a report that I had filmed on Halloween rituals around Britain.
As I wrapped up my live conclusion to the piece, Bryant Gumbel, the show’s host, said: ‘Charles, thanks for that. Most interesting…But I can’t let you go without asking about the royal marriage. What is going on there?’
‘Ah!’ I replied. ‘That’s a different sort of witch hunt, I’m afraid, Bryant!’
He laughed, and – to my relief – thanked me again for the report and swiftly moved on to the next segment of the show. He had done his job in asking the question. I had done mine in closing it down.
In the first fifteen years of Diana’s time in the public eye, the only time I tried to give access to my sister was when I was a twenty-year-old student at Oxford, in 1985.
One day the landline in my digs went, and one of my flatmates picked it up, chatted briefly to the caller, then passed the receiver to me: ‘It’s for you – it’s Bob Geldof,’ he said, with admirable nonchalance.
Geldof had got my number through his long-term girlfriend, Paula Yates, who had been a close friend of mine. He had recently been making headlines with his outrage at the appalling famine ravaging parts of Africa.
‘Hi, Charles, I need your help. You may have heard Midge Ure and I are doing something big for the starving in Africa,’ he said, ‘and I’d like your sister to get involved…’ He then laid out his hopes for how Diana could assist his bold initiative, as a figurehead.
I immediately rang my sister and relayed Geldof’s wishes to her.
She thought hard, then replied, ‘I’m sorry, Carlos, but if what he’s setting up is brand-new, and it sounds like it is, then I’m just not allowed to get involved.
Charities have to have been established for many years before I’m allowed to be linked to them, in case they aren’t a hundred per cent legitimate, or they fold. ’
I rang Geldof back with the disappointing news. He cursed with frustration, but either he persevered through other channels, or – as his plans progressed – Diana judged that she could ignore the normal rules surrounding royal patronage, and help the cause that had so caught the public imagination.
Either way, when I went to the Live Aid concert, three or four months later, the largest crowd reaction on that tumultuous day was the roar of approval and excitement from the seventy thousand people present when Diana appeared unexpectedly, and stepped into the Royal Box.
The musicians from the Band of the Coldstream Guards, who were playing a fanfare at that moment, found their efforts drowned out.
Diana was just a week or so past her twenty-fourth birthday, a youthful, beautiful royal, known for her love of pop, and her presence gave her valuable seal of approval to that thrilling day.
She was the ultimate in box-office gold, an enormous asset for those charities lucky enough to garner her support.
But this unique value could be a curse for her, as it attracted the attention of charlatans.
*
When we first met, in NBC’s London bureau, Martin Bashir led with a promise that he absolutely was not coming to me with any hope of gaining an interview with my sister.
Rather, he claimed, his purpose was to inform me that he was working on a Panorama exposé on how British government agents were spying on Diana.
They were, Bashir asserted, serving as outriders in a wider establishment plot to bring her down.
Luckily for Bashir, his attempt to get my attention with this fabrication made perfect sense to me.
A friend in the intelligence services had recently warned me that MI5 were working to discredit me and my family, as part of a wider conspiracy to embarrass and undermine Diana.
Bashir’s wild invention corresponded with what I had learnt from another, trusted, source.
When I immediately confirmed that I was happy to help him with his report, as much as I could, he must have been stunned at how well his deception was going from the start.
At that first meeting, I mentioned to Bashir that I was trying to track down the former head of security at Althorp, for some help.
Back then, before phone hacking was known about, I was trying to find out who was behind leaks of information to the UK tabloids, as well as details relating to my children, and to private visits to Althorp by Diana, William and Harry.
I was in a rush that evening, meeting up with a new girlfriend for an early dinner, so Bashir and I agreed that we should reconvene at Althorp, as soon as possible, and talk some more.
A couple of days later Bashir bustled into the Library at Althorp, carrying a briefcase.
He had the concerned air of a doctor called out to a home-visit by a gravely ill patient.
We sat across from one another, in front of the Library’s fireplace, and he began laying out what I would later realize was a litany of lies.
Bashir was, he stressed to me, a devout Christian.
This claim lent a further aura to the mantle of trustworthiness that his Panorama calling card bestowed on him.
I was already inclined to help a BBC man, having worked alongside that organization in my NBC capacity – indeed, I had recently returned from working out of the BBC’s bureau in Johannesburg.
I assumed that the clever, bespectacled man in the highly polished brown shoes sitting opposite me shared the same high journalistic ethics as those of my NBC colleagues.
Bashir was quiet, thoughtful and focused.
After repeating his intention to expose MI5’s dirty tricks against Diana, he struck.
With a flourish he produced what I now know to be a forged bank statement that he claimed to have recently uncovered.
It was in the name of my former head of security, had a Channel Islands address, and itemized supposed payments from the tabloids, and from people that Bashir referred to as ‘dark forces’.
The BBC man then wove in an even more extraordinary story.
The Prince of Wales, he claimed, wished Diana and her family – particularly me – enormous harm.
Bashir maintained that the secret services were supporting the prince in his aims.
Bashir said that he had heard from an excellent source that the prince referred to himself as being ‘in the endgame’ with the Spencers. He had supposedly declared, among other things, that he would not be happy till my estranged wife, Victoria, was ‘six feet under’.
I found this part of Bashir’s presentation astonishing. I could not see why Prince Charles should so much as think about Victoria – a quiet presence, whom he could barely have registered during the handful of family occasions on which they had maybe met – let alone want her dead.
I assumed this could only mean that the prince loathed Diana so much that he, by extension, also detested me.
From there, his tendrils of hate somehow extended as far as Victoria.
It seemed beyond belief, but I believed it.
Of course, these were fantastical inventions designed to ensnare me, and get to my sister. But I had no idea of this at the time.
Bashir added to my growing dismay when passing me a two-way earpiece: ‘From now on, when you receive a phone call from anyone remotely suspicious, put this into your listening ear, and you’ll be able to continue the conversation while recording what’s being said on a cassette.
’ As he would with Diana, Bashir was setting a scene in which bad actors were closing in, and he was the one man who could be relied on to counter them.
At the end of our bewildering meeting Bashir said that he would return with more information when he had properly collated it.
While my beat at NBC was features and soft news pieces, a decade in the newsroom had taught me the importance of source-checking.
Besides, in his introductory letter to me, Bashir had said I was welcome to verify his approach with his BBC superiors.
So, as soon as he left Althorp that day I called Steve Hewlett, Panorama’s executive producer.
‘As you must know, I have just been with your Martin Bashir,’ I said. ‘Is everything that he says true?’
Hewlett replied: ‘Yes, you can rest assured – Martin’s one of our finest. You can trust everything that he says.’
So I did.
When Bashir and I next met at Althorp a few days later, this time in the added privacy of my office, he presented me with another bank statement. This one included details of highly suspicious payments made to two former Royal Navy officers who had become Diana’s courtiers.
Commander Richard Aylard had worked for her in senior household positions for several years before, in 1991, switching to head Prince Charles’s Kensington Palace office.