Over the years, though, she did build up a rapport with her other near neighbour, the resident of number 1A Clock Court, Princess Margaret, occasionally going to the theatre with her and, in a daring breach of royal protocol, even travelling to royal engagements with her. After the Waleses’ separation, Princess Margaret wrote to Prince Charles and informed him that she was going to continue the association with his estranged wife. For her part Diana always spoke fondly of the Queen’s sister, telling James Colthurst, ‘I’ve always adored Margo, as I call her. I love her to bits and she’s been wonderful to me from day one.’ So her shock was all the greater when she received a ‘wounding and excoriating’ letter from the Princess, following Diana’s appearance on Panorama. From that day on Princess Margaret wanted nothing more to do with her. She turned against Diana so vehemently, in fact, that she went round her apartment turning over the cover of any magazine that featured Diana on the front. Her children, Viscount Linley and Lady Sarah Chatto, who had previously enjoyed a warm friendship with Diana, realized that, in their mother’s eyes, she was now an untouchable. David Linley, who had gone skiing with the Princess and had written her warm and affectionate letters, now hid behind the garage wall at Kensington Palace when he was tinkering with his sports car rather than acknowledge her presence. ‘He went out of his way to avoid her,’ recalled Princess Margaret’s chauffeur, Dave Griffin. And when Diana bought a present for Lady Sarah’s first baby, Samuel, who was born on 28 July 1996, the Princess, now fully aware of the social difficulties, handed it to Griffin to pass on to Lady Sarah.
(There was no thaw even after Diana’s death. Princess Margaret argued that she should not be allowed to lie in the royal chapel or have a royal funeral, and it was noticeable that, on the day of the funeral, Princess Margaret merely nodded in the direction of Diana’s cortège when it passed the Queen and the rest of the royal family outside Buckingham Palace. The other royals followed the Queen’s example and bowed firmly. When suggestions were made about replacing the statue of William of Orange, which stands outside Kensington Palace, with one of Diana, Princess Margaret resolutely opposed the idea. ‘I’m not having that woman outside my bedroom window,’ she told her staff.)
As far as the Queen’s sister was concerned, Diana had exceeded the bounds of propriety in agreeing to talk publicly on television about her marriage and her royal life. At that time she, and other members of the royal family, had their suspicions about, but were not fully aware of, her complicity with Diana: Her True Story. As with so much in royal life, they had collectively chosen to turn a blind eye to her behaviour, especially as she had never publicly admitted any collaboration with me. So, as far as they were concerned, Diana’s candid TV interview was the first time she had ever made her views known in public, and as such her TV confessional was both shocking and unforgivable.
In the wide-ranging interview with Martin Bashir, the Princess, wearing striking black eye make-up that gave her a haunted look, discussed her failed marriage, her eating disorders, her attempts at self-harm, her post-natal depression, her husband’s adultery – using that famous phrase, ‘There were three of us in this marriage so it was a bit crowded’ – as well as admitting her own infidelity with the Life Guards officer James Hewitt. ‘Yes, I adored him, yes, I was in love with him,’ she said, adding that she had felt ‘absolutely devastated’ by his betrayal when she heard about the book he co-authored.
The most withering assault though, she saved for her husband, casting doubts on his fitness to rule even as she spoke of her own ambitions for the monarchy as well as for herself. ‘I would like to be the queen in people’s hearts . . . someone’s got to go out there and love people and show it,’ she argued, her choice of phrase seen as a sly swipe at the Sovereign’s chilly style. As for those she considered her enemies she was defiant. ‘“She” won’t go quietly, that’s the problem,’ she said. ‘I’ll fight to the end, because I believe that I have a role to fulfil and I’ve got two children to bring up.’
It was seminal television; the Princess, confident and eloquent, speaking over the heads of the Establishment to the man and woman in the street – as she had in her Time and Space speech and, indeed, for Diana: Her True Story. As Andrew Neil, the former editor of the Sunday Times, who serialized the Diana biography, commented: ‘It is the video of the Andrew Morton book and much, much more.’ At the time it was seen as a devastating riposte to Prince Charles’s Dimbleby interview, a fatal ratcheting of the couple’s tit-for-tat behaviour that finally prompted decisive action by the Queen. To friends and enemies alike, the Princess’s behaviour seemed in keeping with her character: reckless, heedless of advice, leading by her heart not her head, impulsive, playing the victim while desperate for the love of the public, manipulative, contrived, self-indulgent, vengeful, unstable . . . but great theatre. ‘Like an ageing, isolated Hollywood star, she sought the love of an amorphous “public”, and no one around her seemed capable of restraining her growing need for popular adulation,’ wrote her American biographer Sally Bedell Smith disdainfully.
In the eyes of the royal family and many in the Establishment, Diana was now beyond the pale. Princess Margaret’s view echoed that of the House of Windsor, in believing that she had behaved inexcusably by questioning Prince Charles’s right to be king as well as challenging the Sovereign herself. In their eyes, there was only one queen and she had served the nation impeccably for fifty years.
Royal relations with Diana, already frosty following the separation, went into deep freeze after Panorama was broadcast. Prince Andrew, who had known Diana from childhood, would have nothing to do with her and fell out with Fergie, suspecting that she was instrumental in encouraging Diana to reveal all on television. Most woundingly, Prince William himself refused to speak to his mother for several days because of the way she had talked about James Hewitt. In the months to come it would be the one element of her interview she regretted, admitting that she only spoke about her lover because of the ‘cue’ given by her husband with his own confession of adultery on the Dimbleby documentary.
Even the Princess’s below-stairs friends in the Kensington Palace ‘village’ were dismayed by the show. ‘I said to her that that was the biggest mistake you have made because in your silence was your strength,’ Dave Griffin said. ‘She didn’t like me saying that.’ Other supporters, outside the royal condominium, were equally disappointed. ‘It was unutterably damaging,’ according to David Puttnam, who, along with media heavyweights like Clive James and Max Hastings, had counselled her against, in her words, ‘putting her side of the story’. Later Diana wrote him a ‘sweet note’, saying that she thought she had let him down. Puttnam, who sent her a long letter advising her how to mitigate the fallout, was just one in a long line of allies who condemned her television appearance. ‘It was Diana at her worst,’ wrote her friend Rosa Monckton, while the Princess’s former astrologer, Penny Thornton, considered her performance ‘contrived and insincere’. The word ‘psychobabble’ was used a lot by friends and enemies.
While Diana never breathed a word to Puttnam, Thornton or anyone else about the driving imperative behind the interview or of what she had feared might befall her had she not gone ahead, at the time the more perceptive commentators tried to divine the motive behind her actions. The veteran journalist, Lord Deedes, who was to become friendly with Diana during her landmine campaign, wrote in bewilderment:
So what was the inner driving force behind last night’s sad performance? Considering the risks incurred, it must have been very strong. She has grievously upset the Queen by plotting with the BBC behind her back – she has played false by her own personal staff and will not be readily forgiven for that. All this to what end?
In groping for an answer, he suggested, as did the majority of commentators, that she was competing for status and ascendancy over her husband. It became the agreed view in both the pro-Diana and the anti-Diana camps. Not surprisingly, the pro-Prince Charles lobby, whose party line was that she was mad and
sad and therefore bad, were perplexed. ‘When the interest in Camilla’s divorce was past, the fuss over Dimbleby long gone, and life was pleasantly uneventful, the Princess of Wales released another Exocet which took everyone back to square one,’ wrote Charles’s biographer Penny Junor in baleful tones.
As for conspiracies, Jonathan Porritt, Prince Charles’s friend and adviser on green issues, was mystified: ‘Some of these stories of the sort of uncaring, unfeeling, almost a sort of plot against Princess Diana, seem very strange.’
Of course neither he, nor Deedes, nor any of the twenty-three million people watching the show (the greatest number of viewers ever to have watched a Panorama programme before or since) knew anything of allegations of MI5 surveillance backed up by bank statements, apparently genuine, or of the Princess’s fear that her life might be in danger. There was the usual harrumphing against the BBC, but even the government could not find fault with the corporation; indeed two Tory whips told a BBC executive that it was ‘blatantly obvious that Diana emerges as the villain and not the BBC’.
In the offices of Panorama, though, worried colleagues of Martin Bashir were not so sure. The story of the forged bank statements was now emerging. There was concern not just that Bashir had used the statements in order to snag the interview with Diana, but that the use of the name of Penfolds Consultants, which was central to the inquiry into the football manager, Terry Venables, could jeopardize the impending Venables legal case. More than just Bashir’s career was at stake.
Three senior Panorama journalists – Mark Killick, who worked with Bashir on Venables, the producer Harry Dean and the TV veteran Tom Mangold – attempted to question Bashir about the bank statements. He refused to speak to them, referring them to the programme editor, Steve Hewlett. At an acrimonious meeting, Hewlett told them that it was none of their ‘f—king business’. It might just have been coincidence, but a few weeks after the broadcast, the first-floor apartment of Matt Wiessler, the graphic designer who had forged the bank statements for Bashir, was broken into. Nothing was stolen – apart from the green computer disks containing details of the forged bank statements. Wiessler was now very concerned as the implications of his own actions began to sink in. ‘The little bastard,’ he said of the thief. As a senior BBC producer told me, ‘The BBC found itself with a substantial dilemma. The story [of the forgery] was essentially true. So here was this enormously successful programme, and if it turned out that lying, cheating and deceiving had taken place, the feeling was that things could go pear-shaped for the BBC.’ The reaction was to close ranks and blame ‘jealous colleagues’.
In the event, Diana came to the rescue. The show’s producer, Steve Hewlett, had told his boss, Tim Gardam, that he could provide proof that there was nothing wrong with the interview. Shortly before Christmas 1995 a handwritten note from the Princess arrived by courier. In it she had written that she was happy with the way she had been approached and the manner in which the interview was conducted. Of course, at that time she fully believed that the bank documents were authentic, and that she was under MI5 or MI6 surveillance. In short, she did not realize that she had been duped. As the journalist Richard Lindley wrote in his history of Panorama, referring to the Bashir affair, ‘In the absence of any plausible explanation, he was wrong to do what he did. That cannot detract from the brilliance of his interview with which Diana expressed herself completely happily.’
After such a tortuous journey and controversial outcome, why did Diana write about the interview in such glowing tones? A friend of the Princess, one of the handful who knew about the genesis of the programme, explained to me: ‘If you are in a paranoid state of mind and something comes out that you think is OK, the original reason for doing it is not in your mind at all. You are on a different plane. Her mood had moved on. People saw her in a strong, dignified way standing up for herself. It was a triumphal moment.’
In the immediate aftermath of the broadcast, Diana was on a high. ‘I’m on top of things at the moment. I’m fine and I’m strong and I’m looking forward to whatever the future brings me,’ she said. Haunted, anxious and scared beforehand, the Princess now felt vindicated and safe, the immediate danger past. More than that, she felt intensely grateful to Bashir for having provided the means for her to articulate her message. In fairness to Bashir, even though the methods he used to bring Diana in front of the camera were highly questionable, if not duplicitous, it was Diana who bore full responsibility for the way she answered his questions. He did not put words in her mouth. She took control of the narrative of her life, telling her story in the way she wanted it told. As Stephen Twigg remarked, ‘It was another example of her growing confidence in herself to take control of her own life without reference to others.’ When she doubted herself she was nourished by the mountain of mail which she had received since her Panorama confessional. In just a few days, some 6,000 letters from distressed women who suffered from eating disorders, loneliness or who were desperately unhappy with their lives, arrived on her desk. They had recognized something in Diana’s emotional openness on TV that reflected their own sadness, pain and isolation. ‘I’m overwhelmed by the response. Amazing,’ she said, adding that she would try and meet some of those who had written to her.
This reaction, by both the Princess and the public, echoed the response provoked by my book three years earlier. As she had been then, she was nervous before going public, but felt relaxed and vindicated when she was handed the first batch of letters from people who had genuinely connected with her. Perhaps the most touching was from a young woman in Perth, Western Australia, who said that she had been abused as a child, anorexic as a teenager, and as an adult had never learned to read or write properly. Inspired by Diana, she had decided to go for medical help and enrol on a literacy course.
What Diana had not expected was that so many people would be surprised by her opinions, particularly of Prince Charles, as she had tried to prepare the ground beforehand. In many respects the interview was an abbreviated version of Diana: Her True Story, and it told those in her circle, and on its fringes, little that they had not heard many times before. The parade of newspaper editors and TV correspondents who had dined at Kensington Palace or entertained the Princess in newspaper boardrooms had listened to her talk much more frankly about her doubts concerning Charles and her aspirations for the future than she had on television. ‘No views were expressed that I didn’t know already,’ commented her butler, a view reflected by others in her circle. Submerged in the immediate commotion was the constrained and contained way she talked about her eating disorders, her post-natal depression, her selflaceration and even Camilla Parker Bowles. The impression she gave was of a woman discussing a persona she had left behind. Her message was plain: ‘I have moved on.’
When I listen to the tapes made in 1991, of Diana talking about that period in her life, which she called ‘the dark ages’, the difference is striking. Back then she spoke with a breathless haste, her tone urgent, emotional and at times even frenzied. It was the voice of a woman who, beneath the banter and laughter, had little sense of self-worth and was groping, almost shamefully, towards articulating her dreams of a life beyond the royal world.
In 1991 she had still been the fairy-tale princess who saw herself as, and indeed was, a prisoner inside the royal redoubt. Her television interview some four years later revealed a calmer, more controlled character, a woman who now had a clear sense of herself rather than one who was defined by others, notably the monarchy and the media. Here was a woman who was focused, self-reliant, articulate and emotionally literate, unafraid and unembarrassed to talk about her problems. ‘I think every strong woman in history has had to walk down a similar path, and I think it’s the strength that causes the confusion and the fear,’ she said defiantly. The Princess was effectively bidding farewell to the old Diana as she essayed her curriculum vitae for her future role in the nation’s affairs. Nevertheless, the overall effect of the interview was to prove very negative for Diana’s
image, ambitions and legacy.
That Diana would one day have given a TV interview is not in doubt. In 1994 a three-pronged assault, from myself, Colthurst and the Daily Mail journalist Richard Kay, came close to persuading her to appear on an ITV documentary about her life. She herself was very keen to do an interview about her charitable work, but her senior staff, particularly her press secretary Geoff Crawford, opposed it. As a secret compromise, the Princess agreed to be surreptitiously filmed visiting down-and-outs on London’s South Bank. There was never any question that she might give the sort of explosive interview that appeared on Panorama.
So why did Diana choose to give this interview just when everything seemed to be going her way? The answer seems to be that she only agreed to the interview at this time because she was fearful of various conspiracies against her – fears that had been enhanced by her conversations with Martin Bashir and by the forged documents he had shown her. If Diana, who was much smarter than her opponents gave her credit for, had been able to choose the appropriate moment for a TV interview it would have been after her divorce when she was an independent woman, free from the constraints of royal protocol and able to talk openly about her life and ambitions. If she had lived, it would have been just the first in a series of TV interviews with big names like Barbara Walters, Oprah Winfrey or Clive James. While Bashir is now a star in his own right, his career has been dogged by controversy, particularly over his interview with singer Michael Jackson, which Jackson called ‘a deception and betrayal’. Even the New York Times was moved to call Bashir’s show ‘callous self-interest masked as sympathy’ for the way he seemed to have duped the superstar. The Duchess of York drew parallels between the Jackson show and the Diana interview, claiming on the The View TV show that the Princess would never have said all the things she did if he hadn’t ‘tricked’ her – a claim he denied. A BBC executive who worked with Bashir noted after the Jackson row: ‘The dodgy graphic seems all of a piece with the Michael Jackson stuff.’ Diana’s premature death means that her only TV interview is both her testament and epitaph, the interview’s timing setting off a chain of events that are felt to this day.
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