The Diana Interview: Revenge Of A Princess | Nh
Lady Diana Spencer was just 19 when she became engaged to the 32-year-old Prince of Wales. It was her first serious relationship. Diana stepped into the biggest fairy tale of all, which was marrying a future king. She was marrying a prince. And in fact, it was like she’d opened the wrong door.
Suddenly, she’s in this trap. I I’m amazed that she’s been brave enough to take me on. And I suppose in love, of course, whatever in love means. Diana was being lied to by everyone, not just for 20 minutes here or there, but for 10 years. After more than a decade in a suffocating marriage, the princess was desperate to speak out.
I remember she was becoming more and more incensed by what was going on and the fact that the whole organization as she saw it was helping to support the relationship between Kamar and Prince Charles. And in 1995, the princess began a series of clanderstein meetings with BBC journalist Martin Bashier.
His attempts to secure an interview with Diana and now are the subject of fresh allegations by her brother L. Spencer here. The man accused of helping Bashier speaks on camera for the first time. Came home one night and I had a call from Martin Basher and he asked me to do him a favor.
He gave me the absolute minimum information I needed so that I could do the work and it was really urgent and really important. Then on November the 5th, Bashier and his BBC crew set out to film a sensational interview with Princess Diana for its flagship program, Panorama. We left BBC White City at 7:00 that evening in my estate car.
All the equipment was hidden. I used hi-fi boxes, so if anybody looked in, they would see highfidelity equipment. If anybody had found out about this, they would have tried to put a stop to it because this was unprecedented. She said she had no intention of giving the interview, but suddenly it seemed right, particularly with a divorce and a gagging clause, she believed, drawing ever nearer.
It was then or never. As we were walking to the door, I was thinking, I hope I pull this one off because it’s the most significant bit of filming that I’m ever going to do. Diana opened the door and Martin said, “Hello, Captain. These are the boys.” And uh she said, “Hello, boys. Do come in. Call me Diana.
” This is the story told by those who were there of what was said in one of the most important television interviews of the 20th century of the legacy it left and why it really happened. She won’t go quietly. That’s the problem. I’ll fight till the end because I believe that I have a role to fulfill.
Just after 10 10 from Clarence House came the glass couch and our first chance to see Lady Diana. London was electric. Suddenly we were all out on the streets partying. I remember on Fleet Street they were standing all sorts of boxes to get a view as as as the carriage went by. The royal wedding on the 29th of July 1981 between Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer was watched live by 750 million people worldwide.
We all bought into the magic. I joined the throng outside must have been 100,000 people and these these events are amazing. Their relationship seemed to work both on a theatrical level and we all hoped on a personal level. We had a newish government in Margaret Thatcher. Where there is error, may we bring truth.
She was shaking the country up in a way that many people didn’t want it to be shaken up. A lot of industries were closing. There was high unemployment. In the early part of 1981, there had been riots in Brixton. The country felt very divided. The royal wedding and the romance of Charles and Diana was this fantastic antidote to all that.
The riot has never advocated a republic. I was covering it for the BBC. I was there that whole weekend. The Queen was not their target. So, one of the things about the British royal family, it’s always seemed to have a universal appeal um to different classes and to different races.
So, I definitely felt an affinity as a young Brit and I wanted the wedding to succeed. [cheering and applause] The world gets its first full glimpse of the fairy tale princess Demure behind her veil. As bewitching and romantic a bride has ever touched the heart of the world. [cheering] Here is the stuff of which fairy tales are made.
In many ways, we were given this idea that the marriage was a fairy tale and we bought it. Well, we bought it with bells on and from then on we all thought that’s what it was that nothing could go wrong. Was it ever a fairy tale? That’s what we have to ask. I first met Diana in France skiing and she really brought a lot of laughter to the trip.
She was very very funny to have, you know, around. She had a very good sense of humor, very timely and quick oneliners. She shared a flat with three friends off the Brmpton Road, the hen house, as she called it. On the door of her room, she had a chief chick sign. Diana first began dating Charles when she was a 19-year-old kindergarten teacher.
I went round to her flat and at about quarter half 10 I heard quite a throaty engine turning up outside the window and then she appeared about 5 minutes later stormed in saying they’re working him much too hard. It’s quite wrong that they should push him so hard and there were a few knowing nods from the flatmates.
I asked her whose car it was and then then she said it was Prince Charles. Ah, good. Nice car. Good babe trap. I said, “You know, before meeting Diana, Prince Charles had been playing the field, but he was now in his early 30s, and he was still a bachelor.” The pressure on Prince Charles to find a bride was intense.
And I think actually everyone rather enjoyed the game of uh watching him just pass a a woman, you know, in the street almost and we’d marry him off immediately. There was enormous pressure on him to find a wife. So it must be marvelous when Diana came along. I felt sorry for her. She was chased through the streets.
It must have been shocking to find yourself a prey in the way that she was from the very outset. You know, going back to your car and being surrounded by paparazzi. The arrival of Diana changed the way that the royals were reported. These had been very dull years. There was a bit of interest in Margaret because she clearly had a drink problem, but there was nothing there was nothing that was going to push them forward into the 80s. Hello, Diana.
Fantastic. In 1980, newspapers were big business, selling 16 million copies per day, among the highest rates per head in the world, and competition for sales was rife. She sold papers in a way that I hadn’t ever seen one person sell papers before, to the point that we used to refer to her as the princess of sales.
Is there any possibility of any announcement of your marriage in the near future? Can you tell me? Can you tell me if there’s any possibility? But I’m not going to say anything. Prince Charles did give us a hint himself. He said we wouldn’t have to wait too long. Be careful. The romance moved incredibly quickly, if you can call it a romance.
I mean, it was incredibly formal at the time. she had to call him sir. And they didn’t do the usual things that young people were doing even in the 1980s. They didn’t go to the cinema. They didn’t go out to dinner together. So they never got to know each other. Um I mean that’s a tragedy if you like. Um because they would have discovered that they were remarkably ill-matched.
He liked Deucey, she liked Duran Duran, you know. Uh she loved city life and he loved country life. You know, he liked shooting and she hated all of that. Compatibility was not the couple’s only problem, however. When did Camila come on the scene? I don’t think Camila was ever off the scene. Um, you know, that that’s a fact.
I mean, Camila was there before Diana was married. Charles had been in a relationship with Camila Parker BS for several years, but she had had a series of boyfriends and was deemed an unsuitable match for the heir to the throne. Realizing this, she’d opted for a different future. Charles was boxed into a corner really.
He didn’t really have a choice about marrying Camila cuz she in the meantime had fallen madly in love with a dashing army captain and and married the man. So Charles and Camila wasn’t going to happen. So he took the next best bet. 11:00 a.m. Buckingham Palace. The long awaited, much writtenout engagement had happened.
Now you’re about to marry the Prince of Wales and and one day you would all in all likelihood be queen. It’s a tremendous change for someone, if I may say, of 19 to make all of a sudden the transition. It is. But I’ve had a small run up to it all in the last 6 months. And next to Charles and I can’t go wrong. He’s there with me.
And I suppose in love of course in love. and the Prince of Wales, he sort of hesitates and sort of the bottom jaw drops, you know, whatever love means. But, you know, I think he was being truthful. Here was a classic case of a marriage whereby the male was already in a a loving relationship with somebody else.
Prince Charles was due to go to Australia for 3 weeks on a official visit. Diana came to the airport to see him off and she’s seen in tears waving him goodbye. Her tears, as she later told me, were not because Prince Charles was flying off, but because she’d walked into the waiting room before he departed and was on the telephone to uh Camila Parker BS.
She was a young woman, very, very young woman. And um honestly, you know, fresh faced and pure in every sense, which makes it honestly even more deceitful by Charles. Just days before the wedding, at the rehearsal, veteran royal photographer Ken Lennox recalls how Diana had changed. I was shocked to see her at the rehearsal um in St.
Paul’s with Prince Charles coming down the stairs. There was nothing off her. You could see her cheekbones. Now Diana was a a teenager, 19 years old with a bit of puffy fat. She had a roundish face, but we could see that she had been dieting. We thought dieting at that stage. Her face is gaunt.
She’s lost pounds of weight and it’s the start of her bulimia nervosa. This eating disorder that plagued her throughout her royal career. [cheering] With bulimia, you feel that the life you’re leading has got so many elements that you can’t control, but you can control this one. I’ll eat. I’ll throw it up. I’ll eat. I’ll throw it up.
So it was about extreme control of herself, of her body in a world over which she essentially had absolutely no control in any other direction. Prince Charles was simply unable to give Diana the emotional security she so badly desired. One of the most shocking things that Diana told me was that the night before the wedding, Charles told her that he didn’t love her.
And that was a truly terrible thing to do to your future bride. You know, that you were going to marry in St. Paul’s Cathedral the very next day. And I think Charles didn’t want to go into the wedding on a false premise. He wanted to square it with her. And it was devastating for Diana. She didn’t want to go through with a wedding at that point.
She thought about not attending the wedding. But this was untenable as her sister made clear, albeit jokingly. She’d already had that with her sister, too. And you know, and that famous comment of, “Well, your face is on the tea towels now, so you’re you’re stuck.” You know, back then, Diana probably believed she could win Charles’s love and make him forget Camila.
Charles himself was also trapped by circumstance. In January 1981, he wrote to a friend, “I do very much want to do the right thing for this country and for my family, but I am terrified sometimes of making a promise and then living to regret it.” But the public demanded a wedding, a national event to create the semblance of unity.
[cheering] The country basically got the day off. We go on the source. You know, the whole thing was a fantastic kind of example of what the UK is finally washed up as. We were a massive kind of welltailored pantomime. For Diana, the day itself was emotionally charged. It was a a confusing day for her.
She had hope in her heart for Prince Charles. And then she’s walking down the aisle. She spots Camila in a girlbox hat and she thinks, “I hope that little interlude is over because this is the man I’m I’m going to marry.” Hi, Diana Frances. Take thee, Bennett Charles, to my wed husband to love and to cherish to the death house to part and there too I give thee my truth.
What of course happened to Diana was that she stepped into the biggest fairy tale of all which was marrying a future king. She was marrying a prince. He was going to transform her world. They were going to live this extraordinary life. They were going to be in a castle.
She didn’t have to be Rapunzel letting down her hair. And in fact, it was like she’d opened the wrong door. Suddenly, she’s in this trap. For a period, the couple seemed to be trying hard to make a go of their relationship. And soon after their marriage, Diana became pregnant. On the 21st of June 1982, Prince William was born. May we see your son, your own.
When Prince William was born, there was national rejoicing. It is an important marker in the life of the monarchy. She must have been very pleased it was a boy cuz that’s what you’re meant to do. And I think they had hope that this was going to work and they were trying to make it work. Naturally, progress was slow as the floral tribute.
When the couple made their first foreign official visit to Australia in 1983 with their one-year-old baby William, it was Domania from the start. [cheering] The prince realized very quickly it wasn’t really him the people had turned out to see. I’ve come to the conclusion that really it would have been far easier to have had two wives to have covered both sides of the street and I could have walked down the middle directing the operation.
You know, everybody laughed at it, but actually deep down he was annoyed at this, you know, almost saying, “Well, actually, this is my show. You’re meant to be coming along to support me.” It was this jealousy factor. Diana had begun to discover her own celebrity. But what should have established the basis of a public partnership instead sewed the seeds of what some saw as resentment.
What emerged was this huge popularity that the royal family from the queen even her own husband and and others had a problem with it. It was this jealousy factor. They they couldn’t really understand what is it that this woman has got that I haven’t got. Why can’t I achieve this? They switched to an open Rolls-Royce and traveled through the Botanic Gardens to the Opera House for undoubtedly the biggest welcome of this tour so far.
Diana, it seemed became all too aware of her husband’s discontent. I was maybe 4T from Diana. We started to move off and Diana burst into tears. She just wept. Prince Charles, he was looking at his side of the car and never even glanced back. I was really shocked. So I went to Vic Chapman who was the press officer on the tour.
He was a a Canadian, a big bluff man. And I said, “Vic, the princess was in tears.” “Yes, Ken.” I said, “Why? What happened?” And he said, “Ken, mozzy bites and jet lag.” Well, of course, I knew Vic was making it up, and Vic knew I knew Vic was making it up. Despite apparent problems within the relationship, Diana soon became pregnant again with Prince Harry.
At 2:35, the waiting was over. And in September 1984, she provided another heir to the throne. The following day, the couple presented Prince Harry to the world. I’m standing outside the hospital and Jimmy Gray, who was a Daily Mail royal photographer at the time, said to me, “Do you know he’s going to leave here and go and play polo?” I said, “Get out of here.
” He said, “No, that’s what he’s going to do.” I said, “Jimmy, do you want to bet on that then?” He said, “Yeah, okay. How much?” And Jimmy said, “50 quid.” Less than an hour later, Prince Charles left to play polo. I lost 50 quid because I couldn’t believe that a man, his newborn baby was going to leg it and play some daff game of polo.
Doing something like that to a wife with a newborn baby was atrocious. If he thought he could treat his wife like that, he was in deep trouble. It was a symbolic moment when uh she gave birth to Prince Harry as she told me the shutters came down and so you can almost date the end of the marriage to that period and that was only what four years in into the marriage.
I think the princess served her purpose. She gave the Prince of Wales what he really wanted, an heir and a spare. and then he could safely return to the love of his life, Camila Parker Balls. There is a level of sympathy for Charles that he was in an impossible position. He’d had a really rubbishy childhood.
He’d been pretty neglected by his parents. But if you had got that behavior from just a normal bloke, the world would have seen it as really shocking. Uh Charles clearly abused her emotionally. In private, the couple began to lead separate lives with Diana based at Kensington Palace and Charles mainly at H Highrove in Gsters. Charles was now seeing Camila on a regular Clanderstein basis.
Diana lived a life where she was being lied to by everyone from the police to the courtiers to the chef to the valets to the footman who all knew and subscribed to Prince Charles’s undercover relationship with Camila Parker BS but told Diana a separate story. So people have said oh she was paranoid.
Well, she had every right to be paranoid because she was being consistently lied to for not just for 20 minutes here or there, but for 10 years. I was the butler at H Highrove. And every weekend, Princess Diana and the children would spend the weekend at High Grove, but during the week I was the butler for the Prince of Wales at Highrove.
Now, there were two very different worlds. one a family unit during the weekends and a single man’s life during the week. Now, the princess would ring me up during the week and say, “Where’s Prince Charles?” I said, “Well, I I can’t really say. You’ll have to ask him.” Where was he? Um, Prince was out seeing Camila Parks. He’d say, “I’m feeling awfully tired tonight.
I think I’ll take an early night. I’ll have my dinner at 7:00 instead of 8. So, I’d set up the dinner table and the prince would eat alone and he’d light the fire and he’d have his dressing gown on and he’d watch the television. But as soon as I cleared the dinner, the car was roaring down the drive. Charles couldn’t understand why Diana would sit cross-legged on the chest freezer eating a bowl of cornflakes because his argument be, well, we’ve got a perfectly good dining room.
But actually she enjoyed you know sitting talking to the chefs talking to the flower ranger the housekeeper because actually from that conversation from that gossip came all the news you know what’s happening now eventually of course you know snippets of information get out so she knew exactly what was going on the princess of Wales felt not the slightest apprehension about her visit to the Middle Sex Hospital and its AIDS ward during this period Diana decided to strike out publicly on her own.
Daringly, the princess chose to campaign on behalf of HIV and AIDS sufferers, discarded at the time as social untouchables. To the delight of the staff, she clearly wasn’t wearing gloves. In the very early days, everything was frightening about AIDS. Nobody knew how it was transmitted.
Nobody knew if you sort of breathed, whether you would get it or if you shook someone’s hand. and she just rode over all those fears and that made a major turning point. Today the hospital reckoned that the princess’s visit was worth all the government propaganda put together. But this was not simple altruism. The princess was also creating a new powerful social profile from which she could derive strength.
She absolutely knew that she was going to be embraced by a lot of people in the world who felt her sense of frustration. It’s all right to be vulnerable. It’s all right to be humble. Uh she was saying, “This is okay. You have your own struggles. These are your stories.” Despite her growing celebrity, Diana craved personal love and intimacy.
So, she began an affair of her own. Soon after I started working with her, she was in a relationship with James Huitt, which in a sense was understandable. I mean, I accepted that. Not for me to make any moral judgment. There is a husband and a relationship with with a woman for years. I I suppose in essence, Diana thought, well, look, you know, if it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for me.
Ken Warf would accompany Diana on her secret weekend visits to stay with Huitt at his mother’s cottage. I used to arrive at that at the cottage in Devon and um initially speak with you know his his mother and um we would just allow that that weekend to evolve. They sort of walked occasionally outside of the property but spent the vast majority of it inside it.
I think that as a young a young woman you know she she herself wanted that sexual side of of her life to to mature as well. No, it wasn’t doing so in her marriage. Her relationship with James Hugh was a long-term affair. And there’s no doubt that Diana was looking for love and this primal rejection by her husband for another woman cut deep and cut continually.
And there was a bitterness there and an anger there and a rage there which never really left her. Diana’s relationship with Huitt ended in 1991, but frustration with a loveless marriage continued. And so she sought advice from old friends about how to find an outlet for her unhappiness. I remember she was becoming more and more insensed by what was going on and the fact that the whole organization as she saw it was helping to support the relationship between Camila and Prince Charles.
and she would have moments of extreme anger and wanting to to, you know, bash the mattress with a tennis racket and that kind of thing. And I said, “Well, I I think, you know, there are ways of, you know, lancing the abscess.” The outlet Diana chose to use for her bitterness and frustration would prove to be a sensational turning point in the war of the Wales.
In 1991, Princess Diana hatched a secret plan at Kensington Palace with her friend James Colthhurst to tell her own story. A plan that would change the course of her marriage. One thought was that a book could be it could come out in a book form over which she had to have deniability over the book otherwise she was in in big trouble.
So she could still provide information but uh uh but but not be seen to be the source. And I think the the idea of it being Morton came up because she had read some of the things that he’d written. Andrew Morton and I were a team. We worked together. He did the words. I did the pictures. He’s about 6’3. Uh good-looking, fit, ran, kept himself in great condition.
He looked a bit like um Superman before he changed into his Superman suit. We were at this cocktail party at the end of a trip and we’re just having a a drink and Diana comes across the room and she leaned up and she took a little bit of fluff from his collar then both hands up and straightened his tie. Well, my jaw hit the floor and Andrew was bright pink by this stage and Dana was as cool as a cucumber.
And I knew right there and then she liked Andrew Morton. Morton and Diana hatched a plan to write the book. James Colthurst was used as the go-between, fing her personal testimony in secret by bicycle to Andrew Morton. It was all fairly innocent looking. Over a few weeks, I I would go and have lunch about once or twice a week at Kensington Palace with a basket on the front of the bicycle and a briefcase with a tape recorder, ginonic before lunch, and then lunch and then the questions.
and then I would leave with this potential dynamite in the briefcase. The covert methods Diana learned here would stand her in goodstead when it came to the panorama interview some 3 years later. The book was done in secret. It was researched in secret. It was written in secret and it was published in secret. The palace were very eager to find out what I was working on to the point where I was warned on a couple of occasions, you know, watch your phones and watch your office.
And uh my office was broken into, camera was stolen, files gone through. It’s not clear who was responsible for the break-in, but at the time, Colurst himself was also fearful. Cycling back, I didn’t want to get stopped. I was I was quite keen to make sure that the material reached and was then off my patch.
It was a little bit like war. You’re into it or not. I remember one time was a drain cover or pothole that had been left to open and the bicycle hit it pretty hard and there were papers transcripts of this, you know, dynamite book were going all over the road. You were playing three-dimensional chess. You were trying to checkmate Fleet Street and checkmate the palace.
It was a very I would say it was a very British affair. Kind of amateur-ish halfbakes, but it worked. After the weeks of hype, the book Diana, her true story is now on the shelves. The book came out in June 1992. There was nothing amateur-ish about its launch. It became a worldwide bestseller, making Andrew Morton’s fortune.
Selling is already described as brisk. Advanced orders for Andrew. The content was revoly. Throughout the whole of my editorship of the son, the royal family, the queen’s own PR, Diana’s PR, Charles’s PR, everybody had denied every single damn story we had ever run of her kind. They’re having an affair. She was weeping.
She She’s suffering from bulimia. All these stories, complete rubbish, load of tabloid nonsense. All being made up. All being made up. All being made up. Hello. Here comes Andrew Morton’s book, by the way. All true. Yes. Believe me, true. You know the Camila. The whole lot. Completely true. I do.
You know what? I could have I could have hugged Andrew Moore. Diana denied all speculation that she had been involved in the writing of the book. People today probably won’t remember that she said, “No, I never met Andrew Morton.” So, it was very duplicitous and must have astounded Prince Charles that she had dared to do this.
And I’m sure he he understood it was all her own words and painting a true picture of um of the marriage. The gloves were now well and truly off in the battle between Diana and Charles for media supremacy. Now they were attempting to openly upstage each other as the princess expertly accomplished on the couple’s tour of India. It was the most febral year in the history of the royal family.
In that long hot summer, the revelations of one member of the royal family followed those of another. If you want to be like me, you got to suffer. The Squidgate tape, as it became known, was released in the late summer of 92. Newspapers say this tape is genuine. It was a covert recording of a telephone conversation released to the press between Diana and an ex-lover, James Gilby.
Squidgy was Gilby’s pet name for her. The tape confirmed some of the details in the Morton book. The telephone conversation allegedly involving the Princess of Wales is reported to have been taped on New Year’s Eve, 6 days after these pictures were taken at Sandringham in 1989. The content, of course, was explosive because here we had Diana talking in a very intimate way with a man who wasn’t her husband and talking highly critical way about other members of the royal family.
The scandal continued with another leaked secret recording by a radio ham. This time, an intimate conversation between Charles and Camila finally proved the heir to the throne was in an adulterous relationship. The first complete transcript of the so-called Camille tape was printed here. Camille Gate. Well, that’s another one.
It obviously played to Diana’s lot that Camila Gate should come in, which was conversations between Charles and and Camila of a sexual nature involving Yeah, I wish I was a tampax and all that kind of stuff, which is pretty won’t get you very far on Tinder. I can tell you that. Pair of knickers. I don’t think you’re going to come back as a pair of knickers.
of course should be a temp. Poor Prince Charles. I did feel sorry for him to be caught on tape and have it broadcast globally that you wanted to be a tampax in your lover’s whatever um is I just I thought Charles never he will never get over this. His reputation cannot um withstand this. Charles and Diana’s relationship had become untenable and was damaging the monarchy.
Inevitably, the palace ordered a split. Although Diana would remain the future queen, it is announced from Buckingham Palace that with regret, the Prince and Princess of Wales have decided to separate. Their Royal Highnesses have no plans to divorce and that the succession to the throne is unaffected by it. On the 20th of June 1994, Charles attempted to hit back at Diana’s growing popularity as well as rehabilitating his reputation post Camilleate by giving an exclusive interview to Jonathan Dimbleby for ITV.
Dimby himself had been drafted in to make a program about the prince’s life and his work. The cameras have followed the prince for more than a year. But I mean, Jonathan Dimmbley, you know, realized that it was a much bigger story, the separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales. On the night, Diana chose to upstage Charles by wearing an off-the-shoulder dress, similar to one Camila herself had once worn.
However, Diana need not have worried. The Dimby interview would be remembered for one thing above all. Were you faithful and honorable to your wife when you took on the vow of marriage? Yes, absolutely. And you were? Yes. Until it became irretrievably broken down. Fantastic. Right. Embarrassment this way. The source of the front page story in the tabloids today is impeccable.
not someone close to the Prince of Wales, but the future king himself. The fact that the Queen’s son was very quietly, right, dropping his trousers with a with a with a married woman, you couldn’t get enough of it. You could not get enough of it. By agreeing to the Dimbley interview, Charles had unwittingly shifted the media war with Diana onto an entirely new theater of conflict.
The effect on Diana was quite profound. and she realized that this has had a huge impact on the debate about the royals and in particular the debate about the Prince and Princess of Wales and she could see that the power of television was extraordinary. Charles’s personal appearance on TV would prove to be a catalyst, launching Diana on a course of action that would change the history of the royal family forever.
Following Charles’s admission of adultery in the Jonathan Dimby interview, the princess wanted to tell her side of the story. Every journalist wanted to interview her, including a little known but ambitious BBC Panorama reporter, Martin Basher, who began trying to get access to Diana. In the course of his work for Panorama, Basher asked his friend and colleague, a BBC graphic designer, to do a job for him late one evening.
Here, Matt Vistler speaks on camera for the first time. I got home from work and I got a phone call from Martin Basher and he wanted me to do a favor for him and it was really urgent and really important. Martin asked me to make up a couple of bank statements that he needed the following day and he did say that they were just going to be used as copies.
So on that night I was just making some props for filming purposes. It was unclear to Visler then why Martin Bashier wanted these bank statements made. But around the same time Bashier managed to arrange a series of secret meetings with Princess Diana. The princess said to me one day, “I want you to drive up to White City and bring back somebody.” So off to White City I go.
A man came out and said, “Hello, are you Paul?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “I’m Martin.” I said, “Well, get in the back seat and under the blanket and I’ll take you to Kennedan Palace.” If anybody had found out about this, they would have tried to put a stop to it because this was unprecedented. And this happened on many occasions.
They got on like a house on fire. Together, the princess and Bashier planned a secret interview for the BBC’s Panorama program. Despite the risks, Diana was desperate to get her story out before a pending divorce. As she explained to Jenny Bond in a private off thereord conversation revealed here for the first time, Diana had told me that she feared that as part of the divorce settlement, she felt was coming. She would be gagged.
She would be prohibited from talking publicly about the marriage in any way. It was then or never. Diana had however expressed a key concern. The editor of Panorama uh told me that the princess had expressed one major reservation and that was that if this became known to Buckingham Palace, Buckingham Palace would find a way of stopping it.
A date was set and in October the BBC secretly assembled its most trusted production team along with Bashier, a senior producer Mike Robinson and Tony P, a BBC cameraman of 25 years. I was phoned at home to do uh this panorama interview and my initial response was I don’t do Sundays cuz that’s my family day or rather the day I go to the pub.
Luckily Tony had a change of heart and in late October he took another call offering him the biggest job of his life. I got a phone call from Martin Bashier uh explaining that it’s it’s a very high-profile uh royal and uh I will only mention this name once and it would be an interview with Diana.
So it was a cloak and dagger style of operation. It was a Sunday afternoon and she said to me, “Paul, you haven’t seen your family all week. Why don’t you go home?” I said, “Are you sure?” “Well, who’s going to serve you dinner?” I said, “She, put something in the fridge. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.” We left BBC White City at 7:00 that evening in my state car.
All the equipment was hidden. I used hi-fi boxes, so if anybody looked in, they would see highfidelity equipment. Martin was driving. Got there at 25 7. There is quite a big like security entrance at the back and there’s always police on it. I am a bit surprised that that a that that a car coming into a royal palace was not in some way searched.
Martin wound down the window and said to the officer, “Mr. Martin for Mrs. Wales.” And the officer looked in the vehicle, saw us. He said, “That’s fine. You’re expected.” Martin then parked the car so it was in the CCTV blind spot. There is a CCTV blind spot at Kennedon Palace and the police can’t see any vehicle parked there.
As we were walking to the door, I was thinking, I hope this works. I hope I pull this one off because it’s probably the most significant bit of filming that I’m ever going to do. Diana opened the door and Martin said, “Hello, Captain. These are the boys.” And uh she said, “Hello, boys. Do come in. Call me Diana.
Next time, the Diana panorama would lead to Martin Basher being accused of fabricating documents to obtain the interview. Most recently by her brother El Spencer, something the BBC has denied for 25 years. I would ask the BBC to come clean on this as a matter of urgency because this interview was undoubtedly one of the most important interviews ever given in the 20th century.
The graphic designer blacklisted by the BBC for speaking out defends himself for the first time. I’ve agreed to talk to you because I’m this guy that’s remembered for forging a document and I want to clear my name and how Diana’s words would prompt a constitutional crisis for the royal family itself.
This was an interview that went to the absolute dark heart of the British establishment, the monarchy. It was explosive television and my goodness, it caused fireworks at Buckingham Palace. She won’t go quietly. That’s the problem. I’ll fight till the end.