Diana BBC interview: William, Harry join push to erase history

Princess Diana wanted to do her much-publicised TV interview with the BBC.

Few people who saw Diana’s Panorama interview can have been in any doubt what they were watching. It was, quite simply, history being made in shocking real time. What made it so utterly sensational was Diana’s clear grasp of what had happened to her. She was truthful about why she gave the interview: she was worried about the “perception” of her during a “confusing” and “turbulent” time.

What did her sons make of it? It’s said she hadn’t even thought about how they might react. Now we know: on one side of the pond Harry responded with soft, cultish waffle, remembering an “honest” and “incredible” woman. On the other side there was just a total wall of anger. I found Prince William’s livid statement after Lord Dyson released his report on Thursday by far the more concerning.

It was as if he literally could not accept the basic reality of what his mother had said. Where I saw a cathartic and triumphant confession, the prince saw a pack of lies and deceit. Where I saw a vital piece of history, he saw something that had to be cancelled. The interview was fake news, he said in a statement that was bizarrely also released as a viral video clip (just why?). All that stuff about his parents hating each other couldn’t really have been how Diana felt, because Martin Bashir had “fuelled” her “paranoia” and “fears”.

Bashir had made “lurid claims” about “the royal family” to secure the interview, so the whole thing needed to be erased and “never be aired again”. It had “no legitimacy”. I’m sorry, but this is how dictators talk.

Was William even half aware of how he sounded? He might as well have been quoting one of Charles’s friends. It was Nicholas Soames, after all, who said Diana was “in the advanced stages of paranoia” when she spoke on the record. For years courtiers dismissed her as “unstable” and “mentally unbalanced” as a way of discrediting what she said. William’s statement suggested the same old hoary woman-hating claptrap. She’s thick, she’s mad, she did a bad thing, let’s shut her down and banish her interview from sight.

It is amazing how quickly you can discredit a person who is a) female and b) dead. For Diana it took just a few hours. By Friday her motives had been reduced to mere smudges, like the scratched-out names of Anne Boleyn’s female relatives who’d been too frightened to let people know they owned the dead queen’s forbidden prayer book. People were questioning if Diana had ever wanted to do the interview. She couldn’t have agreed to it; it must have been Bashir who tricked her. Look anywhere and you saw the damning argument: there was a “straight line” between the Panorama interview and Diana’s death.

Britain's Prince William has condemned the Panorama interview. Picture: AFP

Well, there isn’t. There isn’t even a straight line between the Panorama interview and Diana’s divorce: the couple had already been separated for three years. Even if you did contend that the interview directly led to the divorce and the removal of her security, then you must blame the person who failed to insist on that security, namely, the Queen. To say Diana was not in control of her faculties or didn’t want to do the interview is about as mad as saying she was killed by the BBC.

Diana wasn’t a doll, or a robot, or someone who had no idea what she was doing. She wanted to do this interview – even Dyson said she did in the first page of the report. She had already told her life story to Andrew Morton. She had even wanted to audition Nicholas Witchell. Why won’t people accept she may just have been in charge of her life?

Even the “Diana note”, in which she said she was pleased to have done it, is being cleansed from the record. Here is a letter that Diana wrote, in her own hand, on headed notepaper, a month after the broadcast. In it she says she was happy with the interview and was not shown any documents by Bashir. But if you want to know how much Dyson rates it, he merely tells us it is not a “forgery”.

Harry has also been critical of the BBC interview. Picture: AFP

Ideally, he explained in his pathetically tabloid report ("storm clouds started to appear"), the BBC should have asked her brother, Earl Spencer, to clarify what the princess really thought about the interview.

As a way of valuing women, this is basically medieval. Spencer was, what? The head of Diana’s house, her keeper? In fact he was the person who’d introduced her to Bashir. In one of these meetings Bashir told Spencer 32 lies about the royal family.

I should say at this point I have no time for Bashir either as a human being or a reporter – watching him interview anyone is “like watching ebola hit a journalism college”, as AA Gill once put it.

Princess Diana during her 1995 interview with Martin Bashir. Picture: BBC

But I’m beginning to wonder if I have much time for Spencer either. If he knew Bashir was “clearly bad and clearly lying” nine weeks before the interview, why didn’t he stop her doing it? The closer you look, the less it becomes about Diana and the more about her brother.

What is clear is how little has changed in 25 years. Diana is still treated as a voiceless silly slip of nothingness even by her close family.

She is still surrounded by men who want a piece of her, who will constantly pillory her for not doing exactly what they wanted: the papers are filled with men telling us she died because she didn’t take their advice.

How can William, of all people, add to their number, saying her interview has no legitimacy when it meant so much to her to have done it? Perhaps he would like the whole thing erased from the internet to make way for yet more viral videos that are beneath him, of him reading out statements on ever tinier issues. The arrogance of this family – when will they ever stop?

The Times