Chapter Twenty-Five ‘The Opposite End of the Moral Spectrum’ #2
Meanwhile Commander Patrick Jephson was Diana’s Private Secretary. He had been by her side for seven years, steering her through the high points of her public successes, and the lows of her marriage stalling.
I did not know Patrick Jephson at all well, but I liked and trusted him from afar.
He had always struck me as a steadfast adviser to my sister, blessed with high emotional intelligence.
He remained in tune with his boss’s nature, which became increasingly mercurial after her separation.
Jephson understood the extraordinary pressures that could overwhelm Diana, and make her judgement less stable, while never losing his belief in the force for good that she represented when at her happiest and best.
Now Bashir held in his hands apparent proof that Jephson and Aylard were traitors to Diana. Not knowing that Bashir’s allegations against both men were without a shred of truth, I was astonished and appalled.
While studying the payments made into the two men’s alleged account, I expressed surprise that the bank’s address was, like the one Bashir had claimed belonged to my former security chief, a Channel Islands one.
Bashir did not miss a beat, immediately replying with the lie that Aylard was from a Channel Islands family.
I felt deeply troubled by what I had heard, particularly with regard to Patrick Jephson.
If true, Diana had a traitor at the helm of her office whom, I knew, she trusted completely.
While the accusation seemed incredible, it was coming from a vetted Panorama reporter.
When Bashir urged that Diana had to hear his assertions for herself, I immediately agreed.
I called my sister and gave her an overview of what I had just heard from Bashir.
‘That all makes a lot of sense, Carlos,’ she said, in a sad voice, but with an air of relief that things that had been mystifying her might be about to become clear.
That day she sent me a letter, stating her gratitude that maybe she could now piece together the dirty tricks being played all around her.
I spoke to Sam, an old friend of mine who lived in a flat in Rutland Gate, a few hundred yards from Kensington Palace. ‘Sam, I’ve a favour to ask: can Diana and I please come to your flat to meet someone there? It’s all top secret, and I know it’s a lot to ask, but…’
‘Of course you can. No explanations needed…’
Diana and I arrived at Sam’s flat, and when Bashir later joined us, I noted how nervous and sweaty he was. He talked quickly and looked around a lot. I had seen many people become like this in Diana’s presence and thought little of it – until he spoke.
He quickly launched into an astonishing array of claims. I jotted them down as he went, in longhand, in my ever-present NBC notebook.
Bashir set the context for his many outlandish tales by saying that he knew from his sources that the sixty-nine-year-old Queen was seriously ill with a heart condition, and that she was expected to die imminently.
This was clearly news to Diana. If true, it meant that Prince Charles would soon be King – an event, Bashir emphasized, that would alter things for Diana very quickly, and very dangerously, given the Crown’s unique status and powers.
Bashir went on to say many things that struck me as being ridiculous: one was that an established Royal was not only gay but that they had contracted HIV/AIDS; and that Diana’s thirteen-year-old son William unwittingly carried a bugging device that had been secretly installed in his watch.
This, Bashir said, recorded conversations between William and his mother for use by her enemies.
It is amazing, now, how outrageous Bashir’s inventions were.
Bashir also added to the stories that he had told me during the second of our two meetings at Althorp, about the alleged treachery of Jephson and Aylard.
As she listened to the accusations, Diana looked shocked, long-suffering but accepting.
She barely spoke at all, while I continued in my role as silent scribe.
I believe that Diana was so open to Bashir’s accusations because she was an early and unknowing victim of phone-hacking. She was very much attached to her mobile, relying on it more than most because she was convinced that her landlines were bugged.
She knew that secret facts – shared with only one or two confidants – were finding their way into the tabloids.
Her understandable conclusion was that the people she chose to trust most were giving or selling her secrets to her enemies in the media.
The wild assertions that Bashir made fitted with Diana’s reasonable concerns at that time.
The most animated Diana became that afternoon was when Bashir insisted that Prince Charles was having an affair with thirty-year-old Tiggy Legge-Bourke, the jolly Sloane[*] who helped with William and Harry when they were with their father.
Charles had brought in Tiggy to liven up William and Harry’s time during the half of their school holidays that they spent under his roof. This, while he continued his preferred, hands-off, style of parenting that perhaps chimed with his own childhood experiences.
Tiggy was a cross between a nanny and some form of a big sister.
A bouncy and kind young lady, with a big heart, she was employed to occupy the two boys with outdoors fun.
Tiggy had thrived at the same Swiss finishing school that Diana had loathed and left.
She always struck me as a force for good, whom my nephews liked enormously.
Diana, perhaps resentful of her sons’ affection for Tiggy, clearly wanted to believe in a romance between her and the prince, and Bashir noted her tugging especially hard at that strand from his gigantic web of lies.
Twenty-five years later, Bashir’s gross dishonesty about Tiggy would secure an apology and very substantial damages for her from the BBC.
As the meeting progressed, so my concerns about Bashir mounted.
Beyond the outlandishness of his allegations, there were various details from his account that immediately jarred with me.
For a start, he warned Diana that she was under covert surveillance from MI6 – not MI5, the intelligence agency he had twice before told me was spying on my sister.
At one point he mentioned somebody secretly working against Diana as having received a bribe of ￡14,000.
This was a very specific figure, and it was exactly the same sum that he had mentioned during our first meeting at Althorp as having been paid by a malicious journalist to a member of my staff.
This coincidence struck me as unbelievable.
Equally, that afternoon with Diana and me, Bashir referred to somebody being rewarded for an act of treachery with the services of a prostitute in the Langham Hilton, the hotel across the road from the BBC’s Central London headquarters.
Again, Bashir had claimed at one of our Althorp meetings that the Langham had been the venue for some other whore-mongering by a journalist who, he maintained, was working with my compromised staff member.
I found this further coincidence equally incredible.
At the end of the meeting, I could not wait to escort Bashir out of my friend’s flat, and to get him as far away from Diana as possible.
As soon as he was safely gone, I turned to Diana and said: ‘I’m so sorry, Duch – I’ve completely wasted your time. What that man said just doesn’t add up, and he’s clearly not to be trusted.’
Diana replied: ‘Carlos, please don’t worry! It was just so lovely to see you!’ As she slipped out to her car, I assumed I would never hear the name Martin Bashir again.
When, several weeks later, it was excitedly announced by the BBC that they had secured the astonishing coup of a world exclusive interview with Diana, conducted by an unknown reporter called Martin Bashir, I could not have been more surprised.
I still have no idea how Bashir managed to wheedle his way back into Diana’s life.
He must have bamboozled her with his trickery, while isolating her from trustworthy people.
I assume she was persuaded not to tell me about plans for the interview that had – despite his denials – always been his true aim.
The loyal, wise Patrick Jephson also found himself becoming frozen out as Bashir rose to favour.
Jephson eventually found his position untenable and felt compelled to resign.
This, while not understanding at all why he had so suddenly and inexplicably dropped out of favour.
Bashir told Diana the complete fabrication that Tiggy Legge-Bourke had had an abortion of Prince Charles’s baby.
There is absolutely no question of there ever having been anything other than a professional relationship between the prince and Tiggy.
Bashir also claimed that he had found recording devices planted in Diana’s office and in her car.
Despite all of his dirty tricks, the most infamous Panorama episode of them all still almost did not happen.
Diana thought better of giving Bashir his scoop, pulling out a few days before the recording was due to take place.
But Bashir and Panorama’s executive producer, Steve Hewlett, played on Diana’s fears, desperate to resurrect the interview that they knew could make their careers.
They told her that they had incendiary news to share.
It would be best if she came to them, secretly – they suggested an underground car park.
This would guarantee not just privacy but would also jam any radio transmitters concealed in her car.
It may be three decades on, but I still hate to think of my sister being subjected to needless terror by such appalling, self-serving frauds.
During that clandestine meeting Diana was, I believe, persuaded that her life was in imminent danger. Somehow, she was conned into thinking that giving the interview to Panorama was the best way to protect herself.