Chapter Twenty-Five ‘The Opposite End of the Moral Spectrum’ #3
My grounds for this theory lie in the ‘Mishcon Note’ – the record that Diana’s principal lawyer, Lord Mishcon, had taken down on 30 October 1995 – a day or two after her subterranean meeting with Bashir and Hewlett, and less than a week before the interview took place.
In this memo, Lord Mishcon recorded Diana’s belief that efforts would be made to ‘get rid of’ her by April 1996. She would, she feared, be the victim of a planned car accident that would either kill her, incapacitate her, or leave her appearing ‘unbalanced’.
Mishcon feared for Diana’s mental state, believing her outlandish fears to be signs of paranoia.
I watched Diana’s interview in the Sunderland Room, at Althorp, alongside my mother. We hung on every word, along with the nearly 23 million others in the UK who watched Panorama live, that November evening.
I thought Diana’s line ‘Well, there were three of us in the marriage’, when referring to Camilla Parker-Bowles’s long-standing affair with the prince, devastating in its construction and masterly in its delivery.
Diana’s acceptance that she would never be Queen of England, put next to her hope that she would be ‘the queen of people’s hearts’ was poignant, if – to my ear – a little clunky.
Her belief that Prince Charles was not really suitable to be King struck me as a pretty bold call.
But it is understandable in the context, unknown at the time, that Bashir had fed Diana lies about her estranged husband (the bogus affair with Tiggy Legge-Bourke among them) and that Diana was incensed by the horror and humiliation of it all.
She entered the arena of that interview like a bull sent into the ring after a well-directed electric shock.
And, of course, Bashir had deceived her into believing that the Queen was approaching death, which made Diana fear that Charles’s reign was imminent.
While I was worried that Diana had said quite so much, I was also proud that she had had the courage of her convictions and had chosen to speak publicly about things that really mattered to her.
Prince Charles had, after all, given a similar interview eighteen months earlier, in which he had humiliated Diana by publicly admitting his ongoing affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles.
The majority view of the interview turned out to be sympathetic to Diana, while those already disposed against her were delighted that she seemed to have guaranteed her downfall, once and for all.
Immediately after the recording went out the BBC interviewed Nicholas Soames, a considerably less distinguished Member of Parliament and public figure than his grandfather, Sir Winston Churchill.
A close friend of Prince Charles, and a true establishment man, Soames dismissed Diana’s cri de coeur as paranoia.
To use that word, which denotes a grave clinical condition, so casually, about Diana, struck me as disgraceful.
The BBC had invited me on, to comment on my sister’s behalf, and I had declined.
I regretted this decision then, as I would have welcomed holding Soames to account for this outrage.
For what Diana said was not the product of paranoia. It was, instead, the logical fear of a woman who had been repeatedly lied to by some unscrupulous journalists, working for a highly esteemed programme, broadcast by one of the world’s leading news organizations.
The consequences of Diana’s interview were enormous and almost immediate. The Queen was so appalled by it, and by what Diana had said – particularly about Prince Charles not having the makings of a good king – that five weeks after the interview, the Queen insisted that Charles and Diana divorce.
With hindsight, the end of their marriage looks inevitable.
However, it was not. There could have been a continuation of the separation that had already been in place for five years, with grown-up compromises reached between estranged husband and wife.
But the interview made the death of the marriage inescapable.
The divorce was finalized on 28 August 1996 – with Diana losing her title of ‘Her Royal Highness’ from that date.
I chose not to reveal publicly what I knew about Bashir’s underhand ways because Diana’s interview was so very controversial. If I had mentioned my severe misgivings about Bashir, Diana’s critics would have stated that even her family had been against her speaking out.
However, I spoke to Diana about it all, a year after it was broadcast. I asked her why she had not told me that Bashir had got back in touch with her behind my back, and why she had agreed to grant him the interview.
Diana was sheepish about it all. She said that she had felt it best to tell as few people as possible about her plan to speak in case it had got out, and she would then have had the interview blocked by her enemies in the Palace.
I believe that Bashir and some of his BBC colleagues, in order to land what they boasted at the time was ‘the interview of the century’, fostered in Diana a state of extreme vulnerability.
I maintain that you can go further and draw a direct line between this Panorama interview and Diana being driven by Mohamed Fayed’s Henri Paul in Paris, on the night of 31 August 1997.
One of the victims of Panorama’s lies was Diana’s personal driver, who Bashir framed as an informant against her. That innocent man lost his job.
The paparazzi were, without doubt, the leading cause of Diana’s death, but there is a parallel path to the Place d’Alma that finds its roots in the extraordinarily dark practices that led from the securing of the Panorama interview.
It is to my eternal regret that what I saw as my clear warnings to Diana about Bashir failed to see him off.
I thought I had said enough after he left the secret meeting in my friend’s flat.
But, clearly, I had not. He managed to slide back into Diana’s life, ensnaring her with lies and manipulation.
My sole consolation – admittedly a minor one – lies in my having kept my handwritten record of his fateful first meeting with Diana, and all his devious correspondence with me, in my safe at Althorp.
This included a fax he sent to me immediately after that meeting, detailing further false allegations about Prince Charles and Tiggy Legge-Bourke’s ‘affair’, which he urged me to pass on to Diana.
This evidence, from his own mouth and hand, was to be vital in proving his dishonesty and amorality in a judge-led inquiry in 2020, twenty-five years after the most infamous BBC interview of them all. But, tragically, that was more than two decades after Diana’s death.
Skip Notes
* Upper-middle-class figure – similar to ‘preppy’ in the USA, or ‘bon chic, bon genre’ in France.