Webb’s sources, in fact, are impeccable. We’re given behind-the-scenes information from everyone, from Earl Spencer, Diana’s brother, to what may be Prince William himself. (Although Webb obviously can’t name the present heir to the throne, he makes fairly strong hints.)
This authority then gives Dianarama the latitude to include every little detail surrounding the affair, no matter how delightfully odd. Webb isn’t averse, for example, to indulging, with some side-eye, the conspiracy theories surrounding Diana’s death. “There is no certainty even today [as to] whether Squidgygate was part of a plot pulled together by spooks, or a crazy bit of happenstance unkindly targeting a very unlucky princess,” he writes, before going on to spell out all the reasons that the emergence of phone calls between Diana and her lover, James Gilbey, may have been a spook-led plot.
Webb has an endearing soft spot for Diana. We learn that he keeps a small photograph of her Blu-Tacked to the corner of his computer screen “to keep in mind what it was really all about”. He observes that it’s difficult, now, to know how to feel about the Panorama interview, because “the bad smell that hangs over the interview has robbed Diana of her voice in the segments where she actually did have something very valuable to say”. But he doesn’t take sides in the royal dispute, and has no obvious beef with the now-King.
All his ire is instead directed at two targets: Bashir and the BBC. For even when the corporation found out that Bashir had lied, faked and forged his way into Diana’s Kensington Palace apartment, it refused to let light in on the truth.
