The one regret Princess Diana had after tell-all Panorama interview
By Natalie Oliveri|
The late Princess of Wales had just one regret about doing her now-infamous Panorama interview and it concerned her two sons.
Diana sat down with BBC journalist Martin Bashir for the tell-all, which shook the royal family to its foundations and was watched by an audience of 23 million on November 20, 1995.
The interview made headlines around the world, with Diana telling Bashir: "There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded".
Diana also spoke openly about her struggle with bulimia and confirmed her affair with James Hewitt.
But it was not the contents of the interview that she regretted.
"She told me she regretted doing it because of the harm she thought it had done to her boys," the late princess' friend, Rosa Monckton, told People.
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Prince William was just 13 when the interview was broadcast, Prince Harry was 11.
?The Panorama interview has since been discredited after revelations Bashir had forged bank statements to convince the princess to speak, falsely telling Diana that her some of her closest aides were spying on her จC earning her trust, and that of her brother Earl Spencer, ?so she would bare her soul on television.
In 2021, the BBC published Lord Dyson's independent investigation into the circumstances around the Panorama interview, exposing the journalist's "deceitful" behaviour. The BBC had previously spent more than ?150k trying to cover it up.
"She was frail and that made her susceptible to Bashir," Monckton said.
The interview was done in secret, recorded inside Kensington Palace unbeknownst to Diana's staff and advisors, including private secretary Patrick Jephson.
"[Bashir] told her she couldn't talk about it," Monckton said.
"She cut people out because of that."
Bashir had deceived Diana into believing Jephson was one of those spying on her.
As a result, Diana didn't trust Jephson anymore and made "reckless" decisions about her safety, including her taxpayer-funded Metropolitan Police bodyguards.
He told The Telegraph UK: "Bashir excluded me from the decision-making process because he knew, quite correctly, that I would have advised against her doing an interview of this kind, in this context, without any proper preparation. But I only discovered this 25 years after the event."
He suggested the interview contributed to her death in Paris, two years later.
"I do believe that by listening to Bashir, by believing the lies he told not just about me but about a number of people close to her, she lost confidence in the wider aspects of the royal machine, which she found irksome sometimes," Jephson said.
"It's easy to make fun of things like protocol and proper organisation, but they are there for a purpose. They have the simple intention of keeping them safe and able to do their job.
"The visit to Paris in 1997 was a private visit, but I'd been there many times with Diana. There were particular hazards involved, particularly the paparazzi, and we had dealt with them in the past.
"I have no doubt we would have dealt with them again, but by putting herself in the hands of people who were not competent to look after her, Diana hugely increased the risk of something bad happening. And indeed it did."
After details of Bashir's deception were revealed in 2021, Prince William said "the deceitful way the interview was obtained substantially influenced what my mother said".
In a statement the prince spoke of his "indescribable sadness to know that the BBC's failures contributed significantly to [Diana's] fear, paranoia and isolation that I remember from those final years with her".?
He added: "But what saddens me most, is that if the BBC had properly investigated the complaints and concerns first raised in 1995, my mother would have known that she had been deceived.
Prince Harry said: "Our mother lost her life because of this".
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