Vanished without a trace: ANDY WEBB reveals the damning BBC dossier that could prove its cover-up of Bashir’s Diana deception went all the way to the top – and the cruel lie that Charles was having an affair with his children’s nanny

Before the infamous Panorama interview in which he lured Princess Diana onto primetime TV through a series of lies, Martin Bashir was more or less a nobody in media circles. But what he had going for him was a charm that was both inventive and irresistible. He had a knack for buttering people up.

A colleague said: ‘Like a snake charmer, he was fantastic at looking in your eyes and telling you, ‘You’re brilliant!’ He was terrific at doing sincerity.’

Just how devious he could be – and how easy he found it to pull the wool over the eyes of even the most hardened of hacks – was shown when he joined Panorama and approached Tom Mangold, an old–school reporter with 30 years’ BBC experience behind him. After decades of reporting villainy of all kinds and with 120 Panorama films under his belt, Mangold prides himself on sniffing out a charlatan better than most.

‘One day Martin took me to one side and said, ‘Mr Mangold, I’m sorry to trouble you, but I just wanted to tell you that my brother recently died and on his deathbed he said to me, ‘Martin, when you get to Panorama, imitate Tom Mangold. Write like Tom Mangold. Operate like him, and you will become as successful as he is.’ I was really touched.

‘What I didn’t know until later was that he told exactly the same story to Mike Nicholson at ITV and to John Humphrys.’

The ambitious Bashir was desperate to become a celebrity journalist like them, to be one of the big boys. But to achieve that he would have to pull off a major coup.

One of the biggest stories of the day was the separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Charles had had his say in an ITV interview by Jonathan Dimbleby. If only Bashir could persuade Diana to put her side in an exclusive, tell–all interview with him, he would make the name for himself that he craved.

And for someone who could fool the likes of Mangold, entrapping the already paranoid Princess of Wales was going to be a pushover.

Bashir prepared the ground carefully. He would have to persuade the princess that not only was he sympathetic to her situation but that all those people closest to her were in reality her enemies and either leaking stories about her to the press or conspiring with Charles’s people against her. 

He drew up a list of concocted stories that he knew would appeal to her. But the problem was how to get to her to whisper them in her ear. The route, he decided, was via her brother, Charles, Earl Spencer, a fellow journalist.

But if he was to convince Spencer there were dirty dealings going on around Diana, he would need something to show him rather than just conjecture.

And Bashir knew exactly where to go for what he wanted – his old pal Matt Wiessler, a freelance graphic designer. Bashir had worked with him before to create mock–ups for a Panorama film on the finances of former England football manager Terry Venables and a documentary making allegations against a London policeman.

Now Bashir had an urgent job for his mate – to mock up two documents to look like bank statements, showing a £4,000 payment made by press giant News International, then publisher of The Sun and News Of The World, and another of £6,500 by a consultancy.

Wiessler was suspicious. It was all so hush–hush and urgent. It was odd, too, that the consultancy in question had the same name as the one they’d used in the Venables documentary.

Was he being asked to make forgeries, and if so for what? ‘I did smell a rat. But then I’d done five programmes with Bashir. I had just left the BBC and was going freelance. I’d got a mortgage to pay and I needed to get these jobs in.’

He did as he was told, working through the night, filling in the figures Bashir gave him, then handing the mock–ups to a BBC motorcycle courier who, records show, took them for a handover at, of all odd places, the Sock Shop in Terminal Two of Heathrow.

The airport was en route to Althorp, the Spencer family home, where Bashir was driving to warn Charles that his sister was surrounded by spies and traitors – and kick off the deception that would result in the Panorama interview.

Bashir’s first line of attack had nothing to do with bank statements. Instead he began to talk about Spencer’s then wife Victoria.

‘He went into this whole litany of bizarre ramblings,’ Spencer told me. ‘He said he knew Prince Charles loathed me and my wife Victoria.

‘To be brutally honest, Victoria’s a completely inoffensive figure who I wouldn’t even expect Charles to have recognised in a line–up of three. But Bashir told me that he knew Charles wanted her dead.’

He next produced the forged bank statements made by Matt Wiessler in his spare bedroom in Camden, which would come to play a defining role in the scandal.

But at the time, as far as Spencer was concerned, they were only of marginal interest in what they had to reveal about his former head of security, Alan Waller.

Spencer said: ‘It was just very peculiar really. He told me that he had proof that Waller was working for ‘very dark forces’.’ Spencer asked if he could keep the bank statements, and Bashir refused. But although what Spencer was hearing was mildly intriguing, it wasn’t altogether unexpected since he had suspected that Waller was selling family secrets.

No evidence has ever emerged to suggest Waller was guilty, but in 1995 Spencer firmly believed that was the case.

The bank statements were not something he’d pick up the phone to Diana about but, he said later, ‘that was clearly their purpose’.

When Spencer did not bite and call Diana right away, as Bashir had hoped, the BBC journalist came up with two new forgeries – not, it should be emphasised, the work of Weissler, who was now out of the picture.

Bashir made his second drive to Althorp, with documents that supposedly showed two senior officials in the royal household were being paid big money from a mysterious bank account.

Significantly, he would not let them out of his hands for Spencer to see in full.

But they purported to show that Richard Aylard, private secretary to Prince Charles, and Patrick Jephson, private secretary to Diana and someone who was by her side every single day, were both on the take for tens of thousands of pounds.

Spencer was now sufficiently alarmed to agree to introduce Bashir to his sister. And so the whole sordid saga leading to the Panorama programme began.

Ironically, the two bank statements Wiessler had forged, though they had been dismissed by Spencer and actually played no part in the duping and betrayal of Diana, would prove to be Bashir’s undoing. For one thing, he was always shifty about them, his story changing as it suited him.

When challenged that he had used them to worm his way into Diana’s confidence, he shrugged them off as just mock–ups for his personal research file and not intended for Spencer’s eyes. He had just shown them to him as an afterthought, not as evidence.

Spencer’s version of events was the opposite – Bashir had produced them as part of his case that Diana was in danger.

Either Spencer or Bashir had to be lying through his teeth – and as Lord Dyson would say in his subsequent report on the whole affair: ‘In a credibility contest between Earl Spencer and Mr Bashir, Earl Spencer wins convincingly.’

As he struggled to explain himself, Bashir’s accounts of what had happened became even more garbled when he said it was Spencer who had the bank statements and showed them to him rather than the other way round.

Most ludicrously, he would even suggest that the sums of money and other details in the forgeries had been supplied to him by Princess Diana – even though at that point he had not even met her!

Wiessler remained uneasy about what he had done – all the more so when, shortly after the Diana interview aired in November 1995, his Camden flat was broken into and the floppy discs with the mock–ups on them went missing.

The Panorama programme had shocked him. He told me: ‘I saw the film go out. I went, ‘That’s gonna bring the Royal Family down!’ And I just thought, ‘What have I got myself into?’

Though he had now left the BBC, he rang his old producer, Mark Killick, and told him how he’d done this job for Bashir. He’d kept copies of the fake bank statements, which he faxed to Killick.

Killick was alarmed that the consultancy named in them happened to be the same one Bashir had quoted in the Venables documentary. It didn’t smell right. Killick confronted Bashir: ‘We met in the BBC canteen and I showed him the bank statements. I asked him what they were for and he was clearly very angry that I had the documents. He refused to answer my questions and told me that it was none of my business.’

Killick shared his concerns with veteran reporter Tom Mangold, and together they went to see Steve Hewlett, the editor of Panorama. Killick remembered Hewlett was rude and brusque. ‘He told us, ‘It’s none of your f***ing business.’

But Wiessler would not be put off and took the matter up to current affairs executives Tim Suter and Tim Gardam. He told them he feared the forgeries he had produced for Bashir might have been used to get to Princess Diana.

Bashir was then called in by the executives to explain himself and responded with the lie – the first of many – that the documents were purely for his private files.

He insisted they had not been shown to Princess Diana, to Earl Spencer or to anyone else. He even produced a note from Diana saying: ‘Martin Bashir did not show me any documents, nor give me any information that I was not previously aware of. I consented to the interview on Panorama without any undue pressure & have no regrets concerning the matter.’

In these few words, just before Christmas 1995, she ended the possibility that the giant hoax which had just been perpetrated upon her by Bashir a month earlier, would be discovered, at least not in her lifetime. To her, the questioning of Bashir was simply further evidence of the ‘dark forces’ at work to bring her down.

Of all the disturbing documents in this saga – the forgeries, fakes, ‘mock–ups’ and ‘certificates’ – her note to Bashir would have the most malign consequences. It would make him temporarily invulnerable, allow him to gather a basket of media awards for the interview, a Bafta among them; to become a celebrity in Britain and a millionaire anchorman in the US – in short, to have it good for a quarter of a century.

For BBC bosses, fearing catastrophe for them and the entire Corporation, Diana’s exoneration of Bashir was a get–out–of–jail–free card. They could file the issue away – which is just what they did. They were off the hook.

Killick produced a seven–page memo for management detailing all he knew about Wiessler’s suspicions and concluding that the mystery could only be cleared up by asking Spencer whether he had been shown the forgeries – a suggestion that was not followed up.

This document – crucial because it shows what BBC top brass had been told about Bashir back in 1995/6 – has disappeared from the BBC archives. It is by no means the only piece of evidence to mysteriously go missing, as I discovered in my 20–year investigation.

But if BBC executives thought they had buried a potential crisis, they were wrong.

Lurid stories involving a princess, forgeries, burglaries and possibly spies are too good to stay hidden for very long. Journalists were sniffing around and one, Mark Hollingsworth, received a call from a trusted BBC source about a barely suppressed scandal was bubbling in a corner of the broadcaster’s White City building.

Hollingsworth passed on what he had learned to the Editor of The Mail on Sunday, who put chief investigative reporter Nick Fielding on to the story.

Fielding tracked the graphic designer down to his quirky new home on an island in the Thames, reached by narrow footbridge.

They talked at length and Fielding proposed a deal whereby Wiessler would provide a signed statement describing exactly how he had been asked to produce the forgeries in a rush, and how they had been delivered to Heathrow Airport. So it was that Wiessler decided to become a whistleblower.

The paper promised to protect his reputation – the bank statements might be forgeries, but he was innocent of any wrongdoing. A stooge maybe, but an innocent one.

The BBC realised that Wiessler was talking when a Mail on Sunday executive rang Tim Gardam and told him that the paper had confirmation of the existence of the forgeries and that they may have been shown to Charles Spencer and to Diana too.

Gardam spoke to Bashir, who repeated his assurance he had shown the documents to nobody, not Diana, not Earl Spencer, no one. The newspaper kept pressing the point, and so late that night Gardam called Bashir again.

This time he crumbled. Yes, he had forged the bank statements and, yes, he had shown the forgeries to Spencer after all.

Gardam was horrified. He said later: ‘I was absolutely staggered that a BBC journalist could have behaved like this, to lie, to produce something to deceive someone, and then at the same time lie to his editor and managers.’

This was the point at which the BBC could have come clean, admitting the deception that had been played on Diana and sparing her all the consequences of that interview – including, it has to be said, the circumstances in which she dumped her closest advisers and protection officers and laid herself open to that tragic end in Paris. But, even though they were horrified that Bashir had commissioned forged documents, passed them off as genuine and lied about it, the BBC would withhold all this from The Mail on Sunday, and cover it up for more than 25 years.

On April 7, 1996, the paper splashed across the front page: ‘DIANA’S BBC MAN AND FAKE BANK STATEMENTS.’

The BBC’s response was a statement from the press office, approved by Tony Hall, the director of news and current affairs.

It read: ‘The draft graphic reconstructions on which this story is based have no validity and have never been published. They were set up for graphics purposes in the early part of an investigation and were discarded when some of the information could not be substantiated. They were never connected in any way to the Panorama [programme] on Princess Diana.’

The information about Bashir that had so appalled Gardam was entirely absent. The BBC had chosen to cover its back rather than admit to the truth.

If BBC bosses hoped their denial and their backing of Bashir would put the matter to rest, they were wrong again, as journalists from other papers followed up on The Mail on Sunday exclusive.

Chris Blackhurst of The Independent again put the question critical question to the BBC: ‘Had the bank statements been shown to Earl Spencer?’

The BBC ducked it, as they had done to this paper, responding: ‘We have nothing further to add.’ The key admission, that Bashir had indeed passed the forgeries off to Spencer as genuine, was not made. Nor, as the Panorama producer Killick had suggested in his memo to management, was Spencer contacted to resolve the issue.

It has to be said that Spencer was not being cooperative.

He told me why he didn’t go public at the time. Although the BBC never revealed to him the truth about the forgeries, he had huge doubts about Bashir. But to have come out as a strong critic of him would have meant effectively painting his sister as a gullible fool. Far better, he felt, to say nothing than open up a family rift.

Nonetheless, it’s highly probable that, if asked, Spencer would have given the BBC an off–the–record briefing. And if they had called him, he, in turn, would have learned that the documents Bashir had shown him were forgeries. At which point, in April 1996, the whole scandal could have been brought to light.

The issue remains of whether the BBC actively decided to contact him or not. The BBC say they did try, though exactly how is not at all clear.

Any communication would have passed through Panorama editor Steve Hewlett, dead since 2017. No written evidence on this or any other aspect of the scandal has survived in the BBC archives.

The two executives who took charge of events in April 1996 were Tony Hall, later to become BBC director–general, and the acting head of weekly programmes, Anne Sloman. Were they really trying to discover what happened, or were they not?

In tomorrow’s Daily Mail, I will reveal how they masterminded the cover–up that would conceal the truth for decades.

Cruel lie that Charles was having affair with Tiggy

In the game of human chess which Bashir secretly directed to entrap Diana, one particular individual was hideously maligned – Tiggy Legge–Bourke, the nanny appointed by Prince Charles to help with childcare following his separation from Diana.

Bashir would convince Diana that Tiggy was Charles’s mistress and that he intended to marry her once he’d got Diana out of the way. It was the key allegation that tipped the princess over into going public with the interview.

Yet nothing could be further from the truth.

At Charles’s London base at St James’s Palace and on weekends at Highgrove in Gloucestershire, Tiggy took on something close to a mothering role. For those were the times when William and Harry were not with Diana at Kensington Palace.

Extremely well–connected in her own right, she was a real country girl. Fishing and shooting were her thing – the country pursuits which Diana shunned – but exactly what young William and Harry appeared to love.

It irritated the princess that Tiggy was so hands–on with her children, so she was ready and willing to believe Bashir when he began dishing dirt on her.

Bashir’s unfolding account began to dwell not so much on Tiggy as a playmate for the young princes, but for their dad: Tiggy had her claws in the man, as well as the boys. A revealing note said: ‘C [Charles] + Tiggy went away for 2 weeks’. Then in a faxed message to Earl Spencer, Bashir wrote slyly of ‘rumours circulating about recurring intimacy between Miss Legge–Bourke and a particular individual. One aide witnessed outdoor pursuits of a different kind.’

He went on to suggest that Tiggy had recently had an abortion, the result, presumably, of earlier incautious ‘intimacy’.

Diana readily bought into this. A friend says: ‘She was obsessed with the idea that Tiggy was having an affair with Prince Charles. She told me that Tiggy was pregnant with his child.’

The princess was shown a document which purported to be a receipt for an abortion which Tiggy had just had, paid for by Prince Charles. It was another forgery by Bashir.

But Diana made crystal–clear that she believed it to be true when, at a Christmas for royal staff at London’s Lanesborough Hotel, she marched up to Tiggy and said: ‘So sorry to hear about the baby.’

The implication was that she had become pregnant and had either had an abortion or lost the baby.

Tiggy burst into tears and fled the room. Daily Mail reporter Richard Kay said: ‘It was deeply distressing, unpleasant and untrue.’

But Diana genuinely believed it – as she did with so much of what Bashir fed to her.

And it looks as if she continued to believe it even after her brother–in–law, Sir Robert Fellowes, on the Queen’s instructions, investigated the matter and wrote to Diana: ‘Your allegations concerning Tiggy Legge–Bourke are completely unfounded. Her relationship with the Prince of Wales has never been anything but a professional one.

‘On the date of the supposed abortion [which Diana had provided], she was at Highgrove with William and Harry. It is in your own best interests that you withdraw these allegations. You have got this whole thing dreadfully wrong.’

As she read the letter from Buckingham Palace she shook her head disapprovingly and said: ‘Typical!’

As for Tiggy, her tears at what Diana had said to her were ones of fury, not an admission of guilt. She sued the BBC for libel for airing the allegations on Panorama and was awarded £200,000.

Adapted from Dianarama by Andy Webb, to be published by Michael Joseph on November 20, priced £22. To order a copy for £19.80 (offer valid to November 22; UK p&p free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.