The story also begins with a little-known BBC reporter ……
More than twenty years ago, there was a small reporter called Martin Bashir in the BBC staff, his lifelong dream is to report a big news, so that he can make a name for himself in the press. But big news is simply unattainable, and even if there is, it will not be distributed to a small reporter like him.
So he began to plan a big event, and the target was then in a marital crisis Princess Diana (Prince Charles and Princess Diana were already separated), after all, even if the news of the royal family is small, it is enough for the public to discuss.
But Princess Diana is not so easy to see, and besides, Bashir is just a reporter who has just started, without any royal background, not to mention strong connections to help him match, how can he interview Diana?
So Bashir set his sights on the Princess’s only brother, Earl Spencer, who, as the British know, has had a very close relationship with the two siblings since childhood.
On August 24, 1995, Bashir left a phone message for one of Earl Spencer’s assistants: “We are not seeking an interview or information, we just need to want to have a 15-minute conversation with you.” He then sent a letter on BBC letterhead claiming, “I have been investigating media behavior for the past three months and have found something that may be of interest to you.
In fact, Bashir is simply lying, and he has not conducted any media investigations. He did, however, hint in his letter that a painstaking investigation uncovered a media that was targeting and secretly spying on the Spencer family, including his sister, Princess Diana.
Reluctantly, Bashir contacted Spencer’s assistant again on Aug. 29 and was finally offered a “drink with him” at 6 p.m. in London.
Bashir was overjoyed and thought it was a good idea. In order to continue to curry favor with Earl Spencer and get close to Princess Diana, he falsely claimed that Earl Spencer’s former head of security, military veteran Alan Waller, had been hired from time to time by Murdoch’s News International and intelligence agencies to spy on the Spencer family.
But at that time Bashir did not give any evidence (because time was too short for him to forge it), so he lulled and said that he would come to Earl Spencer with the evidence in a few days.
Two days later, at 11:30 on August 31, at Spencer’s country estate, Bashir met with him again. At that time, Bashir showed Count Spencer a forged bank deposit certificate of a transfer paid by a news outlet to a member of Count Spencer’s personal team.
It was made clear that there was a traitor among his private team members who received money from the media to spy on the Spencer family in order to disadvantage Diana later.
Afterwards, according to the investigation, before the second meeting with Earl Spencer, he hurriedly approached his former colleague Wiesler, a graphic designer, and asked him to do a bank statement for him. At that time, Wiesler thought that Bashir had really seen the original bank statement and decided to help him with this favor, but he did not expect that everything was just a plot by Bashir.
He took the forged bank statement and told Earl Spencer that News International paid his former head of security, Waller, about £4,000 every quarter, and that another intelligence agency, Penfolds Consultants, also paid Waller £6,500. The other intelligence agency, Penfolds Consultants, also paid Waller 6,500 pounds.
What really got Earl Spencer hooked, however, was another piece of false information from Bashir: that Prince Charles’ private secretary, Richard Ellard, was plotting against Diana. Bashir claimed that someone had secretly recorded a conversation between Ellard and journalist Jonathan Dimbleby, which said, “We’re down to the wire. Let’s throw down the gauntlet.” The reference here was to the fact that Prince Charles had decided to divorce Princess Diana.
The then Earl of Spencer was very surprised, but he didn’t believe it all. So he called Steve Hewlett, editor of The Broadsider. Although Spencer did not reveal Bashir’s statement to Hewlett, he did ask Hewlett if Bashir could be trusted. Spencer said Hewlett assured him that Bashir was “one of the best journalists I’ve ever had.
On September 14, Bashir and Earl Spencer met again. Bashir added fuel to the lie that Diana’s personal secretary, Patrick Jefferson, was allegedly in league with Ellard (the prince’s secretary). Bashir produced a folded A4-sized piece of paper showing that the intelligence services paid large sums of money to Elad and Jefferson to monitor Princess Diana’s whereabouts.
On the note, Bashir also noted, “Jefferson was a good friend of Elad’s and had business contacts until 1992. He was a non-executive director of an investment company of which Ellard was a director. Jefferson was involved in it as a cash investment and resigned in 1992.”
This lie became the final straw that crushed Diana’s sanity, who had been worried about the situation she was in because of the problems in her marriage, and now knew that she had a traitor on her team and had been spying on her. Her trust in the royal family finally collapsed completely.
On September 19, 1995, Spencer introduced Bashir to Diana. Bashir was finally getting closer to his goal ……
During that September 19 meeting, Bashir came up with some 30 allegations in all, including a conspiracy by Diana’s secretary Jefferson: “Jefferson – Danger: Money. left offshore accounts in March 1994.”
Spencer recalled years later that he was still very skeptical at the end of that meeting and had warned his sister himself that Bashir’s story was a bit less than plausible, and that if there was no such thing, he and apologized to her as a false alarm …… but Diana told her brother not to worry.
For Diana, however, that meeting was only the beginning of her many meetings with Bashir. By late summer 1995, she expressed a strong desire to do a television interview.
On November 5, the preparation phase of the visit, it was then that friends around Princess Diana noticed a marked change in her. Diana didn’t trust them anymore, including Jefferson. “From Martin Bashir’s point of view, I was the obstacle that had to be removed,” Jefferson later said, “because if I had advised her not to do the interview, she would certainly have felt that I was up to no good and would not have taken my advice.”
For her part, Rosa Monckton, a friend of Diana’s, said that everyone felt there was something wrong in the middle, but there was nothing they could do about it.
Diana’s lawyer, Lord Mishkin, also said Diana approached him the day after she made it clear she was ready to be interviewed and described to him a series of sensational conspiracies that she said were aimed at her. When asked where she had heard the information, Diana simply replied that they were “reliable.
On Monday, November 20, 1995, “Interview with HRH The Princess of Wales” was broadcast on BBC Radio 1 by the program “Wide Angle Mirror”.
And so it was that this famous interview of the 20th century took place. Princess Diana thought that the Queen had decided that the royal family was about to k*ill her and her entire family, that she had no way back, no friends, and that she was in danger, and that her only way was to pre-empt the conspiracy by revealing everything before it happened.
It was in this interview that Princess Diana famously said, “There are three people in this marriage, it’s too crowded”.
She also said, “My husband, Prince Charles, and the gang behind him, are at odds with me, his foreign propaganda team deliberately smears me, Prince Charles is not king material,” and she admitted to having an affair.
In that year, more than 20 million people watched the live broadcast, properly is the year No. 1 hot search event. After this interview, the Queen wrote to the Charles couple, let them hurry to divorce, each well, do not give the royal family discredit.
This interview, like a depth charge, led directly to the breakup of Diana and the British royal family, and also triggered the anger of the British public, once almost overthrowing the constitutional monarchy. Diana also lost her royal protection after being lured to expose too much personal and royal privacy (the royal family withdrew all security personnel), and the world’s media became even more frantic to hound Diana in the face of her goldmine.
In 1997, at the age of 36, Princess Diana and her Egyptian boyfriend, Dodi Fayez, both d*ied in a car accident in the Pont d’Alma tunnel in Paris as they fled from the press.
For more than 20 years afterwards, many believed that Diana’s dea*th was at the hands of the royal family. Who would have thought that this would happen only because of a journalist’s conspiracy ……
Although both Diana and the royal family were in long-lasting pain because of this interview, for Bashir, he succeeded in getting an interview with Diana, and he succeeded. He became an instant hit and became one of the most famous journalists in the world, getting all kinds of awards. In the battle for Diana’s interview rights, he was the big winner.
BBC executives congratulated Bashir for creating “the greatest interview of our time, changing the way we cover the royal family.
Later, Diana’s brother Spencer came to his senses and felt that he and his sister had been played for fools, so he began to ask the BBC for compensation.
In 1996, the year after Princess Diana’s interview, Earl Spencer accused the BBC and demanded a thorough investigation, but the BBC claimed there was no such thing.
Last year, Earl Spencer again accused and the BBC again tried to cover up, claiming that evidence was missing and that there was no evidence of any improper behavior by Bashir.
Under pressure from the British royal family, they had to agree to a third party stepping in to conduct an independent investigation. The results of the investigation were astonishing.
All the evidence, including bank documents, was forged, and Bashir, a former BBC journalist, violated the principles of BBC journalism by swindling his way to an interview with Princess Diana.
The BBC’s president, John Burt, said that “the BBC had harbored a fraudulent Wide Angle Mirror reporter who had crafted a detailed but completely false narrative about his dealings with Spencer and Princess Diana. “It was “a shocking blot on BBC News; most regrettably, it took 25 years for the truth to emerge. As president at the time, I offer my deepest apologies to Earl Spencer and all others affected.”
And ironically, Bashir remained with the BBC until 1998, when he left to join British Independent Television. in 2016, Bashir was rehired by the BBC as a religious affairs correspondent. After the findings came out, he resigned as the BBC’s religion affairs editor, citing his health (it was revealed that Bashir had earlier contracted Covid-19 and suffered serious complications, and had a heart bypass operation).
However, Bashir’s swindle of Diana for an interview is not an isolated case.
? For later, he used his status as a famous journalist to get the rights to shoot a documentary on Michael Jackson. Subsequently, various tricks were employed to get Michael Jackson into trouble with scandals such as skin bleaching and pedophilia.
