Dyson also concluded the BBC’s initial internal investigation in 1996 into how Bashir landed his interview had been “woefully ineffective” and the corporation had “covered up” any wrongdoing.
Webb’s book, Dianarama, expands the picture further, based on interviews, internal BBC papers, and testimonies from figures directly involved, some of which he claims only recently surfaced.
Webb describes the saga as “a story more lurid, more fantastical, than anything that happened at the Tudor court of Henry VIII.”
One of the central episodes he recounts is Bashir’s initial approach to Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, supplying forged bank statements and feeding him alarming claims about surveillance.
Spencer told Webb: “He was trying to make me paranoid.”
The book alleges Bashir’s deceptions were extraordinary in scale, including false claims Prince Edward had Aids, that Prince Harry and Prince William‘s nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke had gotten pregnant by Prince Charles and aborted their child, and that William, then 13, was wearing a watch used to record conversations.
These claims, Webb writes, helped convince Diana she needed to act quickly, and she agreed to film the interview under unusual secrecy at Kensington Palace on November 5, 1995.
