Princess Diana’s brother believes that the BBC interview she was almost tricked into giving contributed to the fatal accident two years later.
On Thursday, the BBC gave an unreserved apology for how a reporter behaved to secure the interview with Princess Diana in 1995.
The interview caused a great stir, not least her statement that there were three of them in the marriage, a reference to Prince Charles’ current wife, Duchess Camilla.
An independent commission of inquiry has determined that journalist Martin Bashir used dishonest methods to get Diana to stand up and tell about the marital problems with Prince Charles.
John Dyson, the retired judge who has led the investigation, says Bashir presented false bank statements to Diana’s brother to persuade him to arrange a meeting with the princess.
“Bashir’s behavior was inappropriate and a serious breach of the BBC’s guidelines,” Dyson said.
Martin Bashir said on Thursday that he regrets the procedure. He no longer works for the BBC.
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Diana’s brother Charles Spencer says he draws a line from the interview to the car accident in Paris, where Princess Diana died when she and her boyfriend Dodi Al-Fayed tried to get away from paparazzi photographers.
“The irony is that I met Martin Bashir on August 31, 1995, exactly two years later she died, and I really draw a line between the two incidents,” Spencer said in an interview with the BBC on Thursday.
– She did not know who she could trust, and in the end, when she died two years later, she was without any kind of real protection, he says.
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The BBC’s Director-General Tim Davie says the broadcaster accepts that “the process of securing the interview did not live up to what the public has a right to expect”.
– The BBC should have done more to get to the bottom of what happened then and been more open about what we knew. Although we can not turn back time a quarter of a century, we can come up with a complete and unreserved apology, says Davie.
In the Commission of Inquiry’s report, Dyson also criticizes an internal 1996 investigation into allegations by later BBC boss Tony Hall and another prominent figure in the company who laundered Bashir.
“That investigation had major shortcomings and was terribly ineffective,” Dyson said.
Hall admits that the investigation did not hold up at the time, and that it was wrong to let the doubt benefit Bashir at the time. (© NTB)
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