THERE is a road that runs with sickening inevitability from Martin Bashir’s Panorama interview with Princess Diana in 1995 to the car crash that killed her in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris in 1997.
Bashir’s interview hastened the end of Charles and Diana’s marriage. It created an abyss that would never again be bridged between Diana and the Royal Family. It fuelled Diana’s paranoia, her fear and her catastrophic feelings of isolation.
And, fatally, it removed her from the protection of the institution she had married into and left her at the mercy of a drunken French chauffeur, Dodi Fayed’s security measures and a ravenous pack of European paparazzi.
After Bashir, Princess Diana was doomed.
If Diana wanted to tell her side of the story that was captivating the world — and she did — then she could have had her pick of any journalist or broadcaster in the world.
There is not one of them, from David Frost and Oprah Winfrey down, who would not have dropped whatever they were doing to rush to Kensington Palace and the most famous woman in the world.
Lord Dyson’s inquiry into that Panorama interview — and the BBC’s subsequent sordid cover-up — reveal Diana chose a little-known BBC hack called Martin Bashir because he lied through his teeth.
Bashir won access to Diana through her brother, Charles, with a wicked compendium of deceit, deception and fraud.
Bashir told lies that Diana was being betrayed by everyone around her. Lies that money was being paid by newspapers for inside stories, lies about a royal nanny’s secret abortion, lies that the secret services were monitoring Diana’s every move.
And Bashir had his proof — fake bank statements that he had commissioned.
The lies Bashir told Earl Spencer got him to Diana and landed him the biggest career-making scoop on the planet.
Fatally, those lies also encouraged Diana to pour out her tortured heart.
And exactly two years to the day after Bashir met Diana’s brother, she lay dying in a mangled Mercedes-Benz in Paris — with two young sons back in England who would now grow up without their beloved mother.
The cruelty is beyond belief.
At the core of this sordid saga is the most watched factual programme in the history of British TV — Bashir’s face-to-face interview with Diana was watched by a staggering 23million in the UK alone.
It was more than the scoop of the century — it placed a dirty bomb in countless lives and the shockwaves echo to this day.
The bitter aftermath of the interview would push a fragile Princess to the brink.
In her two young sons, it would inflict mental scars they will carry to the grave. The damage done to both of them is beyond imagination.
Even as Lord Dyson’s report was being published, Harry was on American TV accusing the Royal Family — once more — of cruelty and neglect.
It is not too much to suggest walking behind his mother’s coffin at her funeral broke something in Harry that would never be mended.
The rift between the brothers now looks as though it may never be bridged.
Prince Charles is reported to be “deeply hurt” by Harry’s latest confessional — which is royal speak for “totally devastated”.
Will this family ever be reconciled? It seems increasingly unlikely.
The wounds Harry carries, the hurt he seems to want to inflict on his family, his inability to stop pouring out his soul from his pulpit of self-pity and pain — like so much pain and resentment and anguish in the Royal Family, it really begins with Bashir’s interview.
The deceit, the lies, the manipulation that Bashir used as bait to get Diana to sit down before the Panorama cameras was merciless.
After Lord Dyson’s devastating report was published, Prince William responded — calm, dignified and with a heart that was breaking all over again.
William spoke for his family, and this nation, as he addressed the crimes of Martin Bashir and his BBC paymasters — 315 words from a man who never looked more like a future king.
For all of William’s understated dignity, this was an unprecedented and historic condemnation of the BBC, from which it may never recover.
William said: “It is my view that the deceitful way the interview was obtained substantially influenced what my mother said.
“The interview was a major contribution to making my parents’ relationship worse. And has since hurt countless others.
“But what saddens me most is that if the BBC had properly investigated complaints and concerns first raised in 1995, my mother would have known she had been deceived.”
But Diana died without knowing she had been poisoned with lies.
Here is the crime of a BBC whitewash, after the original crime of Bashir’s cynical grooming of Princess Diana.
For it was not just Martin Bashir who sealed the fate of the Princess of Wales.
It was also his morally bankrupt BBC bosses, who investigated questions about the Panorama interview that were almost immediately raised by national newspapers.
And after a token investigation of themselves a year after the interview — and a year before Diana died — the BBC concluded they and Bashir had done nothing wrong.
The arrogant complacency of these BBC big shots is off the scale but it seems that at last some form of belated justice is coming for them.
Lord Hall was head of BBC News when he led what Lord Dyson called a “woefully ineffective” investigation into Bashir in 1996 that concluded the bent broadcaster was “an honest and honourable man”.
Lord Hall has now been forced to resign as chairman of the National Gallery.
And there is a growing body of opinion that believes “the great and the good” at the BBC should be the subject to a criminal investigation.
Forgery, fraud and cover-up — how can there NOT be some form of criminal investigation?
Ten years ago, the Metropolitan Police were raiding the homes of innocent print journalists for a lot less. Why are the corrupt panjan-drums of the BBC above the law?
We now hear: “Martin Bashir’s career is over.”
But Bashir has HAD his career.
After coining it in America and ITV before returning to our national broadcaster, the creep only resigned from the BBC last week.
Bashir and his BBC bosses have all built lucrative, Bafta-winning careers over Diana’s dead body.
They should all burn with shame.
How does this scandal rank in the annals of BBC sleaze?
It is the most shameful moment in our national broadcaster’s history since revelations that Jimmy Savile was a lifelong paedophile, who had his coat held by the BBC for 50 years.
Like Savile, Martin Bashir will leave a stain on the BBC that will never be gone.
Some reckon this sad, sickening affair is the BBC’s Watergate.
But Watergate ultimately brought down Richard Nixon’s government.
And the BBC will carry on slurping at the trough watered by around £4billion a year of licence fee payers’ money, promoting its sneering anti-British agenda, lavishly overpaying its second-rate stars.
But the Corporation has Diana’s blood on its hands.
And if the BBC was a national newspaper, it would be getting closed for ever.
