The curious case of Princess Diana, the two fake bank statements, and a Panorama interview

Imagine, if The Sun, the Daily Mail or The Mail on Sunday were accused of securing a soul-baring interview with a senior member of the royal family by using falsified documents. How great do you think the controversy would be? At the very least there would be questions raised in parliament, select committee hearings, and calls for a public inquiry, apologies and resignations.

Martin Bashir, then the BBC’s Panorama reporter, faked two bank statements in the run-up to obtaining his sensational interview with Diana, the late Princess of Wales, in November 1995.

The 25th anniversary of Diana telling the world via Bashir that she believed there were “three people in the marriage” in reference to her then husband Prince Charles’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles is upon us. This evening (11 October), Channel 5 is airing a documentary, Diana: The Interview That Shocked the World. I was interviewed for the programme because 25 years ago I was an investigative reporter on The Independent and I revealed some of lengths the then young and little-known Bashir had gone to in order to gain his scoop.

Bashir was able to feed the suspicions of the princess and her brother, Earl Spencer, that she was being targeted by the security services. He had two false bank statements made up by a BBC graphic artist. One statement showed a payment from News International, the newspaper group, to Alan Waller, former head of security for Earl Spencer. The other showed a payment to Waller of £6,500 from a mysterious offshore company, Penfolds Consultants.

When Bashir’s colleagues heard about the statements they realised that Penfolds, a genuine company, had featured in an earlier programme Bashir made for Panorama on the business dealings of Terry Venables, the England football manager.

They questioned why the same company should feature in both programmes, one about Venables, and the other intended to be about MI5’s role in relation to the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales.

BBC sources at the time said that when they raised this with BBC management they received three conflicting accounts. The first was that Penfolds had changed hands since the Panorama programme about Venables. The second was that Bashir had stumbled across a genuine offshore company but inserted the name Penfolds. The third was that it was a graphic representation of a genuine statement.

Earl Spencer’s suspicions about Waller were well known. In March 1994, he obtained a High Court order preventing Waller from disclosing information about the private lives of the earl, his wife, children, or members of the royal family.

Until the end of 1993, Waller had been employed to look after security on the Spencer family’s Althorp Estate in Northamptonshire. After the issuing of the order, Bashir approached Earl Spencer about a wide-ranging programme concerning the state of the monarchy and focusing on the involvement of MI5.

In her Panorama interview, the Princess of Wales spoke of how “life became very difficult” when she and the prince had separated.

This manifested itself, she said, “by visits abroad being blocked, by things that had come naturally my way being stopped, letters going, that got lost, and various things”.

She said that she had “no idea” how the so-called Squidgy Tape of her intimate conversation with her friend, James Gilbey, ever became public, but “it was done to harm me in a serious manner”.

Afterwards, the then minister for the armed forces, Nicholas Soames, a friend of the Prince of Wales, accused the princess of “instability and mental illness ... I cannot account for what she was talking about when she referred to mail interception and telephones being tapped. It really is the advanced stages of paranoia.”

Concerns about whether Bashir had used false documents to secure his bombshell interview caused the BBC to hold an internal inquiry. One of those who oversaw the inquiry was Tony Hall, then head of news and today the just-departed BBC director-general.

The review apparently cleared Bashir – he went on to win numerous awards for the broadcast which also earned substantial royalties for the BBC as it was replayed around the world. But details of this inquiry have never been published. The corporation did say that the inquiry “culminated in an assurance from Princess Diana that she had never seen these documents”. What was not clear, though, was whether Earl Spencer had seen the documents – and if they caused him to encourage his sister to grant the interview. “I don’t know,” a BBC spokesman said back then. “All I know for certain is that they weren’t used to secure an interview with Diana.”

Last weekend, The Sunday Times reported they had indeed been shown to Earl Spencer, that Bashir claimed he’d been given them by a security services source. They appeared to show that a former employee of Earl Spencer was selling information about the family.

In a statement the BBC said Bashir was unwell and unable to respond: “Questions surrounding Panorama’s interview with the Princess of Wales, and in particular the ‘mocking-up’ of bank statements, were covered in the press at the time. BBC records from the period indicate that Martin had explained to the BBC that the documents had been shown to Earl Spencer, and that they were not shown to the Princess of Wales. The BBC’s internal records from the time indicate that Martin had met the Princess of Wales before the mocked-up documentation existed. These accounts also say that the Princess of Wales confirmed in writing that these documents played no part in her decision to give [the interview].”

‘Diana: The Interview that Shocked the World’ airs on Channel 5 tonight at 9pm