'Three of us in this marriage': The full story of Princess Diana's BBC interview scandal, 30 years on

By Rosa Silverman

Thirty years ago, the BBC's Panorama interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, sent ripples spreading further than anyone at the time could have imagined.

Some say those ripples reached the tunnel at the Pont de l'Alma bridge along the River Seine in Paris, where, at just 36 years old, the "People's Princess" was killed less than two years later.

But when it aired on Nov 20 1995, the broadcast appeared to be an unalloyed journalistic triumph, its contents highly explosive.

An estimated UK audience of 23 million viewers watched Diana discuss, among other things: her struggles with bulimia and self-harm; her adulterous affair with James Hewitt; and her marriage to Prince Charles, whom she suggested might not adapt too well to being King.

The now infamous candid sit-down gave us Diana's immortal line about her union with the heir to the throne, from whom she was by that point separated: "There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded."

All in all, it made for the kind of scoop that defines a media career. Yet it also became one of the biggest scandals in BBC history (and it's fair to say there have been a few).

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Martin Bashir was the BBC journalist who obtained and conducted the elusive interview with the world's most famous woman. In the middle of the 1990s, it launched him into the big league – before later casting a long, shameful shadow over his employer.

Now, on the 30th anniversary of the programme titled An Interview with H.R.H the Princess of Wales, a new book by former BBC journalist, Andy Webb, reveals what is billed as the untold story of "the deception and entrapment of Princess Diana and the cover-up that followed".

In Dianarama: The Betrayal of Princess Diana, published on Wednesday, Webb predicts the story of Diana's life between the Panorama interview and her death in a car crash in the French capital in 1997 will be picked over by historians and retold for centuries.

He also suggests that without the interview – which he calls "the most controversial broadcast ever made by the BBC" – she might not have died in the way she did. He has argued the scandal should have cost a succession of director-generals their jobs.

The story begins with Bashir, who was born to Pakistani immigrants in south London in 1963 and grew up on a Battersea council estate where, he has reportedly claimed, the "only book in the home was the rent book".

Educated at a comprehensive school, he then studied English at Southampton University and religious history at King's College London, converting to Christianity as a young man. He went on to work as a news and sports reporter for various newspapers and broadcasters.

By his mid-20s, he had moved to the BBC, working as a news correspondent from 1987 to 1992 before joining the investigative programme, Panorama. But by 1995, he was far from a household name, and arguably not the most obvious choice for a Princess Diana interviewer.

Bashir nonetheless pulled it off. He approached a graphic designer called Matt Wiessler and asked him to create some fake bank statements. Wiessler, a BBC employee at the time, did not know what they would be used for.

What the forgeries appeared to show was that a former employee of Earl Spencer, Diana's brother, was selling information about the family. Payments totalling £10,500 looked as if they had been made to Alan Waller, Spencer's former head of security, from newspaper group, News International, and an offshore company, Penfold Consultants.

None of it was real. But at the outset, Spencer had no reason to mistrust the BBC staffer presenting him with apparently credible evidence. His notes from a meeting with Bashir at his Althorp estate on Aug 31 1995 suggested the journalist had told him Penfold was a Jersey-based front company for the intelligence services.

"It hooked me in," Spencer later told an inquiry into the scandal. "I was duped… He very cleverly came to me on my number one bugbear: the bad behaviour of the press, which is of course ironic."

The bank statements, he said, were used "to groom me, so that [Bashir] could then get to Diana for the interview he was always secretly after".

Meeting Spencer at Althorp again on Sept 14, Bashir is also said to have shown him forged statements he had created himself, suggesting Prince Charles' private secretary, Richard Aylard, was being paid by "dark forces" hostile to Diana (something Bashir later denied doing).

Bashir is said to have falsely claimed Diana's own private secretary, Patrick Jephson, had received payments from the intelligence services too, for monitoring her movements. (Bashir has always denied faking Jephson's bank statements.)

On Sept 19, Spencer introduced Bashir to Diana, the first of several pre-interview meetings between the princess and journalist. The 2021 Dyson inquiry would find that Bashir had used the fake documents to gain Spencer's confidence and an introduction to Diana.

(While Bashir would admit to having the statements mocked up, he repeatedly denied showing them to Spencer. "There was never any intention to broadcast them, at least unless I had independently verified the content," he told the inquiry. "I did not show him the graphic reconstructions [of bank statements] to get access to the Princess of Wales nor to manipulate her as has been alleged.")

Spencer thought his sister should hear directly from Bashir about the apparent betrayal by those around her. The idea that she couldn't trust people, and that those around her estranged husband were seeking to discredit her, was not new to Diana. If she was receptive to Bashir's claims, it perhaps wasn't surprising.

Spencer, however, had become suspicious. After the Sept 19 meeting, he warned his sister that Bashir's claims didn't add up. This didn't stop Diana, who is said to have been willing, even keen, to do a television interview by this point. On Oct 29, she confirmed she would do one with Bashir.

It wasn't long before alarm bells rang. After watching the interview, Wiessler told the Panorama series producer he was worried the fake bank statements may have played some part in a deception used to obtain it.

BBC managers asked Bashir to provide evidence the forgeries were not shown to Diana. A handwritten note from Diana herself, on official Kensington Palace stationery, seemed to confirm this.

"I was not shown any documents nor given any information by Martin Bashir that I was not already aware of," she wrote in December. She added that she was placed under no undue pressure and had no regrets.

But in March 1996, the story began to unravel when Bashir admitted to BBC bosses he had lied to them when he'd claimed he hadn't shown the fake bank statements to anyone.

An internal investigation was carried out, presided over by Lord Hall, who was head of news and current affairs at the time of the interview and later became the BBC's director-general.

The investigation concluded in April 1996 that the forged documents had not helped Bashir obtain the interview and that his dealings with Diana had been "absolutely straight and fair". It described him as "an honest man". Wiessler, for his part, never worked for the BBC again following the inquiry's findings.

Meanwhile, trouble was brewing for Diana after the interview. "Her life became… somewhat untethered in a way," Webb told The Telegraph's Daily T podcast last week.

Her divorce from Prince Charles was finalised on Aug 28 that year. She got rid of her police protection and her chauffeur, while Jephson had already resigned in January, just weeks after the interview.

He later explained to the Daily Mail that Panorama – which he called "a disaster" for Diana – had been "the last straw", and that he no longer felt he could serve the Queen while "fighting the Princess's corner in bare-knuckled legal battles with her husband".

Writing in The Telegraph last week, Webb – who, via Freedom of Information requests, eventually obtained 10,000 pages of messages linked to the scandal – contends that "had BBC managers told the truth when it mattered most, then Diana's life might not have followed its deadly trajectory".

Perhaps she might not have ended up with Dodi Fayed in a Mercedes driven by a man who was over the legal alcohol limit, without her former people around her, runs the counterfactual narrative.

This, of course, is impossible to know. What we do know is that in April 1996, Bashir won a Bafta for the broadcast and went on to obtain further dazzling interviews. ITV hired him in 1999, and in 2003 his sensational sit-down with the popstar, Michael Jackson, aired on the British channel.

The following year, Bashir moved to New York to work for ABC News then, six years later, he joined MSNBC, before the BBC rehired him in 2016 as its religious affairs correspondent, and then upgraded him to religion editor in 2018.

But Panorama would return to haunt him and the corporation. In 2020, the manner in which the Diana interview had been obtained fell under the spotlight again when ITV and Channel 4 aired documentaries about it.

The BBC promised a new investigation, while Bashir did not comment. He was recovering from quadruple heart bypass surgery and had suffered major complications from a bout of Covid, said the BBC.

Almost exactly 25 years after the contentious broadcast, Supreme Court judge, Lord Dyson, was appointed to lead the new probe, the findings of which were damning. Bashir had acted deceitfully to obtain the interview, the judge concluded in May 2021. In doing so, he had been guilty of a "serious breach" of BBC guidelines.

The BBC itself came in for serious criticism too. It had fallen short of "high standards of integrity and transparency", said Lord Dyson. When Bashir admitted to lying over the bank statements, it "should have set alarm bells ringing". Most serious of all for the broadcaster's reputation, Lord Dyson found it had engaged in a cover-up.

Following Lord Dyson's report, the BBC apologised fully: for the way the interview had been secured; for failing to make a greater effort to get to the bottom of what happened at the time; and for failing to be more transparent about what it knew.

Bashir, who left his BBC job on the grounds of ill health around the time of the report's publication, apologised too and said he deeply regretted the subterfuge. He denied, however, that it played a part in influencing Diana to do the interview. Since leaving the BBC, he has kept a low profile.

Thirty years on from his interview with Diana, as the anniversary and Webb's book bring the scandal back into the headlines, the BBC is meanwhile still dealing with the fallout of what was once celebrated as the biggest royal scoop of the decade.

© Telegraph Media Group Limited 2025

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