On November 5, 1995 a van was waved through the gates of Kensington Palace. Out came men carrying boxes, purportedly salesmen with hifi equipment.
What would play out over the next few hours would change the course of the monarchy and set off a series of events that would end in the Pont D’Alma tunnel in Paris in 1997.
It’s only now that the truth about that day and those ‘salesmen’ is finally being uncovered – of how an elaborate ruse ensnared Diana, Princess of Wales and which involved forged documents, decades-long cover-ups, secret meetings and claims of MI5 bugs, security services pay-offs and AIDS.
The ‘salesmen’ were in fact a BBC crew and that day she would record her fateful Panorama face-to-face, which set off a chain reaction that ended tragically.
Her own brother Earl Spencer has said he ‘draws a line’ between that time and her death two years later.
Likewise investigative journalist Andy Webb who argues in his new, forensic book Dianarama that if it had not been for the events of that November day and the ensuing cover-up, “Diana may not have died as she did,” per the Telegraph.
The only reason, the world now knows, that when the princess agreed to tell all to the BBC’s current affairs program, she had been exquisitely conned.
By the northern summer of 1995, Diana and Prince Charles had been separated for several years, and inside Buckingham Palace, it was, as the then head of royal protection operations Dai Davies later put it, “a civil war” going on.
For every journalist on the planet there was no bigger ‘get’ than an interview with Diana. Oprah and Barbara Walters were both reportedly chasing her; the UK’s most famous newsman of the age, David Frost too.
Meanwhile Diana was increasingly isolated and alone, fighting the PR battle with Charles’ office and, Earl Spencer has said, “extremely vulnerable”.
“She was finding that some of her secrets, shared only with close friends, were appearing in the Press,” the earl wrote in 2022.
“She was understandably rattled by this. Looking back, I suspect she was a very early victim of ‘phone-hacking’ by unknown perpetrators, but nobody knew about this criminal practice in 1995, so she was accepting of the outrageous claims that dark forces were at work.”
And so as TV stars circled the princess, at the BBC an unknown reporter named Martin Bashir, an investigation in 2021 would find, cooked up a plan.
He had Matt Wiessler, a freelance graphic designer, mock up documents to help him get an ‘in’ with Diana’s brother Earl Spencer. (Wiessler was not aware he was doing anything that was not legit.)
First Bashir reportedly drove the 90 minutes to meet with the earl at his family’s famed seat, Althorpe, where he proffered ‘bank statements’ purporting to show that the earl’s head of security, Allen Waller, was in the pay of the security services and the tabloid press.
“He told me that he had proof that Waller was working for ‘very dark forces’”, Spencer told Webb for Dianarama.
Bashir also gave him a device which allowed him to record his telephone conversations in an effort, Spencer told Webb, “to make me paranoid.”
“It was all sort of, ‘You’re in really dangerous waters here and I’m your friend, Martin. I’m going to make it all OK. Here’s a gimmick that’ll help you’.”
What followed was Bashir ‘grooming’ the earl, as Bashir spun a tale of “underhand payments, of spying, and of appalling deception.”
He was, he wrote in 2022, “being deceived in order for Mr Bashir to get to my late sister”.
Bashir made a second trip to Althorpe with documents that purported to show that both Diana and Charles’ private secretaries were both being paid for tens of thousands of pounds from mysterious bank accounts, the implication being they had ‘sold out’ the prince and princess.
Bashir, according to Webb, also faxed the earl to suggest that Tiggy Legge-Bourke, Diana’s sons’ nanny, was Charles’ mistress and had had an abortion.
The journalist was playing, as Webb writes, “a game of human chess” “to entrap Diana”.
Finally, the Earl was worried enough to agree to arrange a meeting between Diana and Bashir; it was these documents that would be the hook that reeled Diana in.
Several weeks after Bashir had first visited Althorpe, in mid September, the earl arranged for him to meet the Princess of Wales at the Knightsbridge flat of a friend known only as Samantha.
During the meeting, the earl took eight pages of notes detailing 38 extraordinary claims, purportedly made by Bashir, including that Prince Edward had AIDS; that Diana’s Kensington Palace phones were bugged; and that MI6 had a recording of Charles and his private secretary discussing the end of his marriage to Diana.
(It goes without saying they were all completely false.)
One note taken by the earl reads: “Bugs on car. Senior police officers making money. 3 lines at KP bugged; mail; read; disinformation down line; line on car bugged.”
Another notes: “D followed twice in car recently.”
Then there was the Tiggy part.
Bashir showed Diana a fabricated document which was supposedly a receipt for an abortion she had had, paid for by Charles.
Diana, a friend told Webb, “was obsessed with the idea that Tiggy was having an affair with Prince Charles. She told me that Tiggy was pregnant with his child.”
This was all part of what Earl Spence has described as “an appalling deception” that reeled his sister in to give her nuclear interview.
The Earl’s dossier of notes from that meeting would, decades later, be used to prove that Bashir’s falsehoods, which stoked her paranoia and growing mistrust of friends, were what convinced Diana to do Panorama.
The next month, on October 30, Diana met with her lawyer, Lord Mishcon to tell him that a “reliable source” had warned her of a conspiracy “to get rid of her” in a car crash.
She also told him that Camilla Parker-Bowles were going to be “set aside” so that Charles could marry their sons’ nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke.
Then, six days later on November 5, those ‘hi-fi salesmen’ arrived at Kensington Palace. Inside their boxes were their cameras and lighting equipment.
Diana made sure staff weren’t around and they set up in her sitting room.
The interview was only 54 minutes long but it rocked the monarchy unlike anything since the 1937 abdication of Edward VIII.
When the Diana episode of Panorama was broadcast on November 20, 200 million people worldwide watched the princess reveal she had suffered from terrible post-natal depression, she talked about trying to “hurt” herself and her eating disorder and how the royal family had ignored her as she had been “crying out for help”.
She also laid bare the rotten state of the Wales marriage, giving us the famous “three of us in the marriage line” and expressing her doubts over her husband’s suitability to be king.
You have to understand this from a pre-Oprah vantage point. The princess’ decision to do tell-all to Bashir was, as her longtime private sectary Patrick Jephson would later write, “suicidal”.
Panorama set off a chain of events that saw Diana excised from royal ranks and put on a path that would lead her to the Al Fayeds’ clutches.
For the Queen, enough was enough. Exactly a month after Panorama aired, on December 20, a uniformed courier delivered letters from Her Majesty to her son and daughter-in-law telling them it was time for them to divorce.
“After Panorama there was no way back,” Diana’s private secretary Jephson wrote in his excellent Shadows of a Princess.
Agreeing to talk to Bashir “finally condemned her to life as an unsupported solo act.”
That included when it came to her protection.
“From the day she was divorced,” her driver and former royal protection officer Colin Tebbutt has said, “we lost the official car. That was the worst day’s work the government ever did.”
Diana had given up much of her official security in December 1993, against the advice of the Met Police, and only used bodyguards when she undertook some official events and when she was with her boys.
Having been fed the notion of “dark forces” working against her and royal staffers on the take, it’s understandable why.
The repercussions of her lack of official security were made clear by Lord Condon, the head of the Met in the 90s, when he testified during the 2008 British investigation into her death.
“Let me be absolutely frank,” he said.
“If, as was my wish, she would have had police protection in Paris, then I’m absolutely convinced those three lives would not have been tragically lost”.
However in 1997, the princess was also the most hunted and photographed woman in the world.
By the summer of that year, now divorced from Charles, she was, as Tina Brown wrote in The Diana Chronicles, “doomed to seek protection from the paranoid rich.”
When Harrods boss Mohammed Al Fayed offered to host her and William and Harry in summer 1997, the Al Fayeds’ “apparatus of security was a powerful attraction”, Brown wrote. In 2008, the Operation Paget report into her death would conclude that Diana “wanted to spend time with her sons in a secure environment and she knew that Mohamed Al Fayed had his own security team.”
Henri Paul, the drunk driver behind the wheel of the Mercedes that night in Paris was part of the Al Fayeds’ security team.
When Diana died, it was still believing that Bashir’s shocking claims were legitimate, however the full extent of Bashir’s dirty tricks would not begin to be truly exposed until the Dyson inquiry in 2021.
After the BBC tasked Lord Dyson to independently investigate the Bashir interview, he found the journalist had used underhanded and deceitful tactics to get her to agree to speak to him.
After Lord Dyson’s ruling, William and Harry did not hold back.
An emotional William, standing in the garden, ironically, at Kensington Palace, filmed a video statement to explain how Panorama was a “major contribution to making my parents’ relationship worse.”
“It brings indescribable sadness to know that the BBC’s failures contributed significantly to her fear, paranoia and isolation that I remember from those final years with her.”
Harry’s statement read in part, “Our mother lost her life because of this.”
Those closest to Diana have made clear the connection they see between Panorama and how she came to be in Paris in 1997, reliant on a self-serving billionaire to keep her safe.
After the Dyson report, Earl Spencer revealed that his first meeting with Bashir had happened on August 31, 1995.
“Two years later, to the day, my youngest sister would be dead – killed in a car crash, with no royal protection officers on hand, having chosen to dispense with the services of those who she should have been able to trust implicitly with her safety,” he has written.
Webb himself argues: “Because of what Martin Bashir had done in 1995 and more importantly because it had then been covered up, Diana’s life had been sent off on a terribly dangerous course, resulting in her death.”
One of the people who was on the closest terms with Diana toward the end of her life was Simone Simmons, her good friend and new age spiritual advisor.
As Simmons put it to Webb for Dianarama: “I hold Bashir fully responsible for Diana’s death. Not partly responsible. Fully responsible. If it wasn’t for him, she would still be alive.”
Dianarama: The shocking true story of deception, cover-ups and the Panorama scandal that betrayed Princess Diana by Andy Webb is out now.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
