Diana on ‘Panorama’: How BBC interview which jeopardised royal family’s legacy became its saviour

Princess Diana shook the foundations of the royal family with her explosive interview on the BBC programme, Panorama — thirty years later, it is the interview itself which sees its legacy compromised.

Aired during the night of the day when Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip had marked their 48th wedding anniversary, November 20, 1995, Diana’s Panorama interview uncovered years of emotional abuse and the pitfalls of her marriage into the British monarchy.

However, the conversation which was long considered a moment of liberation for the people’s princess was found to have been achieved through dubious means in the first place — in 2021, a formal inquiry into the matter had found that Martin Bashir, former BBC journalist and Diana’s interviewer, had acquired the interview under conditions which were “incredible, unreliable, and in some cases dishonest.”

Following the discovery, the interview was pulled and the late Lady Diana Spencer’s admissions in it, overshadowed. A single victor emerged in the arena lined with bombshell revelations and deceit — the Crown.

Betrayal of the betrayed

Andy Webb’s book Dianarama: The Betrayal of Princess Diana, releasing November 25, has revealed several jolting details about how its subject was lured into a web of paranoia and made to reveal her most precious secrets under a false net of security.

The former Princess of Wales was gaslighted into believing lies about those around her, specifically the royal establishment with whom she was on the brink of separation, but nevertheless, was supposed to be an inherent part of it.

Besides an affair of King Charles (then Prince of Wales) with her children’s nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, that never was, Diana was also led to believe that her security was compromised — all via forgery.

“That plan involved the most extraordinary things like creating the fiction that Prince Charles wanted Diana to be murdered,” Webb told Marie Claire. The publication further shared that the plan included forged documents made to prove that “Diana’s trusted private secretary, Patrick Jephson, was being paid off to spy on her”.

The wounded admissions

In the now-unavailable interview, Princess Diana had opened up her wounded heart by the way of her paranoid mind — though driven mad through deceitful means to sit down for the conversation, the admissions made by the Princess during it were honest, and painfully so.

Diana had famously lifted the curtain on a host of rumours which had long marred the reputation of her marriage to Prince Charles — adultery on both ends, her personal struggles with bulimia, among others. While further reflecting on her future as part of the royal family, when Bashir had asked her, “Do you think you will ever be queen?”, Diana categorically refuted the idea, saying that while she would like to be “a queen of people’s hearts”, she could never become the queen of England because she was judged to be a “non-starter”.

“I don’t think many people would want me to be queen. Actually, when I say many people, I mean the establishment that I married into,” she had famously said. “Because they have decided that I’m a non-starter.”

Not going by a rule book and “leading from the heart, not the head” were just some of the factors she had further listed which would have prevented her from leading the nation as a queen.

Due to the scandal which rocked the interview’s esteem, perhaps its greatest loss was the weight behind Diana’s words, which, even under duress, had revealed a side of royalty which had long been speculated but never confirmed — until Diana broke the cycle.

The royal honour

If Diana had felt at the time of the Panorama interview that her relationship with Buckingham Palace was hanging by a thread, its broadcast not only confirmed it but likely vanquished whatever it was which kept it together.

Her brother, Earl Spencer, feels that his elder sister would never have been without royal protection at the time of her tragic death had her dynamic with the royal family not ceased to exist as it had following the release of her conversation with the BBC.

“There are high-ranking people in the BBC who participated in securing this interview, through appalling deception. I am sure that this led directly to Diana being left vulnerable in Paris on the night she died – and Andy Webb is right to hold them to account,” he told PEOPLE.

In many ways, the royal family does appear to be exonerated from the admissions levelled against it by Princess Diana in 1995, if indeed, so many of them came out of a highly misleading scheme which had clouded the accuser’s mind.