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DID DIANA GO ON TV TO GIVE HER FRANKEST INTERVIEW EVER BECAUSE SHE FEARED THAT THE SECURITY SERVICES WERE AFTER HER?; THE PARANOID PRINCESS
From Express - 16/06/2004 (1746 words)
ANNA PUKAS
IF 1992 was the Queen's annus horribilis, then for Diana, Princess of Wales, the autumn of 1995 saw the beginning of her Year of Living Dangerously, when she took the unprecedented step of giving a shockingly frank television interview.
But far from being merely an act of self-indulgence, as many thought, Diana's decision to expose her unhappiness was an act of selfpreservation.
According to a new book by royal author Andrew Morton, Diana was so frightened of the Secret Services that she believed the only way to escape their scrutiny was to escape from Britain. But if she "got at them" first by going public, they would not be able to "get at" her.
Thus was the idea sold to the Princess of going on television. She was, it seems, "frightened" into the most extraordinarily candid interview ever given - and now ever likely to be given - by a member of the Royal Family.
When the BBC Panorama interview was broadcast on November 20, 1995, the nation was divided as to Diana's motives. Some regarded her as brave for breaking with the royal tradition of no public _expression of emotion; others regarded her appearance as a self-serving and vindictive hammer blow against the House of Windsor.
Still others spoke more plainly still - most notably Tory minister Nicholas Soames, who described the Princess as paranoid.
In his latest book, Diana: In Pursuit Of Love, which examines Diana's image since her death in Paris almost seven years ago, Morton appears to give some credence to that stark appellation.
Always prone to suspiciousness - a trait no doubt honed by years of exposure to Palace intrigue, not to mention her husband's own duplicity - Diana's mistrust of virtually everyone around her was fuelled by the cloak-and-dagger campaign waged by BBC reporter Martin Bashir to secure the interview with her.
Her secret meetings with the journalist in underground car parks a la Deep Throat in All The Presidents' Men, Bashir's claims to have a contact in MI5 - all contributed to Diana's growing conviction that she was under surveillance. And to a susceptible mind, anyone under surveillance was, by natural extension, also under threat.
"The cloak-and-dagger nature of their meetings and conversations - could they have convinced her that to fight back, she would have to speak publicly?" Morton asks.
"In short, her famous BBC interview might not have been an act of self-indulgence as many, including the Royal Family, senior courtiers and politicians believed at the time, but rather, an act of self-preservation.
In the prevailing mood . . . the Princess was truly frightened."
Her fear was perhaps all the more corrosive because it came to her at a point in her life when Diana was at last beginning to glimpse light at the end of a very long tunnel. The pain of her husband's betrayal and their eventual separation in 1992 was less raw and her eating disorder was under control.
She had fallen in love with the Pakistani-born surgeon Hasnat Khan and, at that point, in the autumn of 1995, still fancied their relationship could have a future. Relations with her in-laws, while hardly cordial, were at least coolly civil and duly respectful of her position as mother to a future king.
Best of all, after a vacuum period of deep uncertainty over her status as a "non-royal Royal", Diana was enjoying considerable success in carving out an independent role for herself as an ambassador for her favourite humanitarian causes.
For the first time in her life, her confidence in her own decisions and instincts was growing all the time - but it was a fragile confidence all the same.
By the autumn it was subsumed by a fear so strong and real to her that she seriously contemplated fleeing the country. Indeed, in her worst moments, the Princess became convinced that her life was in mortal danger if she did not.
What prompted such a rapid descent from a woman approaching her prime to a woman steeped in terror?
FROM the moment the BBC announced that it had secured the journalistic coup of the decade, people asked: "Martin who?"
Morton says: "That Diana would have given an interview one day there is no doubt.
"Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters were both in talks with her but it would have been at the right time for her. Then along comes Martin Bashir, a man she didn't know, from the BBC, an organisation she had never liked. So how, in those few months, did he reel her in?"
The BBC reporter approached the Princess via her brother, Earl Spencer in August 1995. He was having problems of his own with his former head of security, Alan Waller, and had got an injunction to prevent him revealing family secrets. Charlie Spencer was minded to take seriously any suggestion that the security services were targeting Diana.
The Princess met the reporter soon afterwards and Bashir was able to establish a good rapport with her.
When she had entertained Oprah Winfrey to lunch at Kensington Palace, she had found the queen of American daytime TV rather intimidating. Barbara Walters, also a lunch guest, won the approval of Diana's private secretary, Patrick Jephson, and negotiations for an eventual TV appearance in the States were already under way.
Diana was no fan of the BBC - she viewed the corporation as the voice of the Establishment grey suits she despised so much - but she seemed to sense a vulnerability in Bashir and Diana never could resist a victim.
Sometime in October 1995, Morton alleges, Bashir showed the Princess two bank statements showing payments made to an account held at the National Westminster bank in Brighton. One statement showed a payment of GBP 4,000, from News International, Rupert Murdoch's media company which owns several British newspapers as well as Sky Television. The other was for GBP 6,500 deposited into the NatWest account by an offshore company registered in Jersey.
The sums of money were obviously of no significance to the Princess but whom they were paid to certainly was. The account was jointly held by two men. What disturbed her was that one of them was one Alan James Waller - the former head of security who had been causing her brother so much trouble.
Six months later, in March 1996, the bank statements were exposed as forgeries made by graphic designer Matthew Wiessler to Bashir's order.
Wiessler later stated: "I was under the impression that these bank statements suggested that somebody was getting money to watch Diana. I can't remember if it was MI5 or MI6."
Did Bashir show Diana the bank statements? The BBC says no. Morton, however, believes he did.
To a woman who had long felt isolated and friendless in her own home, who was already in the habit of having her apartments swept for listening devices, those two bank statements would have constituted evidence that she was indeed being watched.
IF THIS evidence had come from a BBC reporter - an outsider to royal circles but an insider from an Establishment organisation - that made it even more credible. He was, as Morton puts it, "a believable witness".
The documents were "critical in creating this sense of impending doom", says Morton.
"They were physical proof. . . that she was under constant surveillance and ultimately under threat from Britain's secret services."
The BBC has always stood by Bashir and firmly denied the fake documents had any connection with the Diana interview.
Diana sounded out several people whose opinions she valued about the wisdom of giving a television interview.
Among those whose counsel she sought were film producer Lord Puttnam. "She told me she had been given the opportunity to put her side of the story and asked me what did I think. I said it was the worst idea I've ever heard."
However, it does not seem to have occurred to Diana - a woman who constantly tested the loyalty of her closest friends and family - that Bashir was also a man in pursuit of a great prize: the first candid and revelatory interview with a Princess of Wales who had much to reveal.
Unfortunately, despite the advice of Lord Puttnam, Clive James and others, Diana was far more consumed with the notion that she was being stalked by "dark forces".
The appearance of the bank statements "tipped the balance.
Whatever her misgivings beforehand, Diana was determined to go ahead, " says Morton. "Her reaction to the documents as related to me by those in her circle was 'terror and horror'."
The interview was filmed on November 5, 1995, two weeks before its broadcast. On the anniversary of the day on which political rebels sought to blow up the Houses of Parliament, Princess Diana, the royal rebel, lit a fuse under the House of Windsor. The repercussions were not, however, all she would have wished for. To vast swathes of the British public she was the wronged wife; she was, indeed, their Queen of Hearts. But Diana was shrewd enough to realise that she could not do anything meaningful with her life without help from certain elements of the Establishment.
Though she had relinquished all but a handful of her charitable posts almost a year earlier, she wanted the work she undertook to be more dynamic.
SHE wanted to be the "cutting edge" royal patron. To this end she had been courting the support of, among others, Douglas Hurd (then Foreign Secretary) and Lynda Chalker, then International Development Secretary.
After the broadcast, however, the support she sought was far less forthcoming as she was labelled a loose cannon.
The Queen, knowing Diana had expressly stated it was "not her wish" to be divorced from Charles, wrote to her daughter-in-law insisting that divorce was now imperative.
Had Diana lived on, carving out her niche as the royal humanitarian, having relationships, perhaps even marrying again, the interview would have been only one blip in a full and varied life.
Perhaps the most far-reaching consequence of that Panorama programme is that, for millions of people, the defining image of Diana is a woebegone, frightened face filling the television screen.
Copyright 2004 EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS
Date: 16/06/2004
Publication: Express
From Express - 16/06/2004 (1746 words)
ANNA PUKAS
IF 1992 was the Queen's annus horribilis, then for Diana, Princess of Wales, the autumn of 1995 saw the beginning of her Year of Living Dangerously, when she took the unprecedented step of giving a shockingly frank television interview.
But far from being merely an act of self-indulgence, as many thought, Diana's decision to expose her unhappiness was an act of selfpreservation.
According to a new book by royal author Andrew Morton, Diana was so frightened of the Secret Services that she believed the only way to escape their scrutiny was to escape from Britain. But if she "got at them" first by going public, they would not be able to "get at" her.
Thus was the idea sold to the Princess of going on television. She was, it seems, "frightened" into the most extraordinarily candid interview ever given - and now ever likely to be given - by a member of the Royal Family.
When the BBC Panorama interview was broadcast on November 20, 1995, the nation was divided as to Diana's motives. Some regarded her as brave for breaking with the royal tradition of no public _expression of emotion; others regarded her appearance as a self-serving and vindictive hammer blow against the House of Windsor.
Still others spoke more plainly still - most notably Tory minister Nicholas Soames, who described the Princess as paranoid.
In his latest book, Diana: In Pursuit Of Love, which examines Diana's image since her death in Paris almost seven years ago, Morton appears to give some credence to that stark appellation.
Always prone to suspiciousness - a trait no doubt honed by years of exposure to Palace intrigue, not to mention her husband's own duplicity - Diana's mistrust of virtually everyone around her was fuelled by the cloak-and-dagger campaign waged by BBC reporter Martin Bashir to secure the interview with her.
Her secret meetings with the journalist in underground car parks a la Deep Throat in All The Presidents' Men, Bashir's claims to have a contact in MI5 - all contributed to Diana's growing conviction that she was under surveillance. And to a susceptible mind, anyone under surveillance was, by natural extension, also under threat.
"The cloak-and-dagger nature of their meetings and conversations - could they have convinced her that to fight back, she would have to speak publicly?" Morton asks.
"In short, her famous BBC interview might not have been an act of self-indulgence as many, including the Royal Family, senior courtiers and politicians believed at the time, but rather, an act of self-preservation.
In the prevailing mood . . . the Princess was truly frightened."
Her fear was perhaps all the more corrosive because it came to her at a point in her life when Diana was at last beginning to glimpse light at the end of a very long tunnel. The pain of her husband's betrayal and their eventual separation in 1992 was less raw and her eating disorder was under control.
She had fallen in love with the Pakistani-born surgeon Hasnat Khan and, at that point, in the autumn of 1995, still fancied their relationship could have a future. Relations with her in-laws, while hardly cordial, were at least coolly civil and duly respectful of her position as mother to a future king.
Best of all, after a vacuum period of deep uncertainty over her status as a "non-royal Royal", Diana was enjoying considerable success in carving out an independent role for herself as an ambassador for her favourite humanitarian causes.
For the first time in her life, her confidence in her own decisions and instincts was growing all the time - but it was a fragile confidence all the same.
By the autumn it was subsumed by a fear so strong and real to her that she seriously contemplated fleeing the country. Indeed, in her worst moments, the Princess became convinced that her life was in mortal danger if she did not.
What prompted such a rapid descent from a woman approaching her prime to a woman steeped in terror?
FROM the moment the BBC announced that it had secured the journalistic coup of the decade, people asked: "Martin who?"
Morton says: "That Diana would have given an interview one day there is no doubt.
"Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters were both in talks with her but it would have been at the right time for her. Then along comes Martin Bashir, a man she didn't know, from the BBC, an organisation she had never liked. So how, in those few months, did he reel her in?"
The BBC reporter approached the Princess via her brother, Earl Spencer in August 1995. He was having problems of his own with his former head of security, Alan Waller, and had got an injunction to prevent him revealing family secrets. Charlie Spencer was minded to take seriously any suggestion that the security services were targeting Diana.
The Princess met the reporter soon afterwards and Bashir was able to establish a good rapport with her.
When she had entertained Oprah Winfrey to lunch at Kensington Palace, she had found the queen of American daytime TV rather intimidating. Barbara Walters, also a lunch guest, won the approval of Diana's private secretary, Patrick Jephson, and negotiations for an eventual TV appearance in the States were already under way.
Diana was no fan of the BBC - she viewed the corporation as the voice of the Establishment grey suits she despised so much - but she seemed to sense a vulnerability in Bashir and Diana never could resist a victim.
Sometime in October 1995, Morton alleges, Bashir showed the Princess two bank statements showing payments made to an account held at the National Westminster bank in Brighton. One statement showed a payment of GBP 4,000, from News International, Rupert Murdoch's media company which owns several British newspapers as well as Sky Television. The other was for GBP 6,500 deposited into the NatWest account by an offshore company registered in Jersey.
The sums of money were obviously of no significance to the Princess but whom they were paid to certainly was. The account was jointly held by two men. What disturbed her was that one of them was one Alan James Waller - the former head of security who had been causing her brother so much trouble.
Six months later, in March 1996, the bank statements were exposed as forgeries made by graphic designer Matthew Wiessler to Bashir's order.
Wiessler later stated: "I was under the impression that these bank statements suggested that somebody was getting money to watch Diana. I can't remember if it was MI5 or MI6."
Did Bashir show Diana the bank statements? The BBC says no. Morton, however, believes he did.
To a woman who had long felt isolated and friendless in her own home, who was already in the habit of having her apartments swept for listening devices, those two bank statements would have constituted evidence that she was indeed being watched.
IF THIS evidence had come from a BBC reporter - an outsider to royal circles but an insider from an Establishment organisation - that made it even more credible. He was, as Morton puts it, "a believable witness".
The documents were "critical in creating this sense of impending doom", says Morton.
"They were physical proof. . . that she was under constant surveillance and ultimately under threat from Britain's secret services."
The BBC has always stood by Bashir and firmly denied the fake documents had any connection with the Diana interview.
Diana sounded out several people whose opinions she valued about the wisdom of giving a television interview.
Among those whose counsel she sought were film producer Lord Puttnam. "She told me she had been given the opportunity to put her side of the story and asked me what did I think. I said it was the worst idea I've ever heard."
However, it does not seem to have occurred to Diana - a woman who constantly tested the loyalty of her closest friends and family - that Bashir was also a man in pursuit of a great prize: the first candid and revelatory interview with a Princess of Wales who had much to reveal.
Unfortunately, despite the advice of Lord Puttnam, Clive James and others, Diana was far more consumed with the notion that she was being stalked by "dark forces".
The appearance of the bank statements "tipped the balance.
Whatever her misgivings beforehand, Diana was determined to go ahead, " says Morton. "Her reaction to the documents as related to me by those in her circle was 'terror and horror'."
The interview was filmed on November 5, 1995, two weeks before its broadcast. On the anniversary of the day on which political rebels sought to blow up the Houses of Parliament, Princess Diana, the royal rebel, lit a fuse under the House of Windsor. The repercussions were not, however, all she would have wished for. To vast swathes of the British public she was the wronged wife; she was, indeed, their Queen of Hearts. But Diana was shrewd enough to realise that she could not do anything meaningful with her life without help from certain elements of the Establishment.
Though she had relinquished all but a handful of her charitable posts almost a year earlier, she wanted the work she undertook to be more dynamic.
SHE wanted to be the "cutting edge" royal patron. To this end she had been courting the support of, among others, Douglas Hurd (then Foreign Secretary) and Lynda Chalker, then International Development Secretary.
After the broadcast, however, the support she sought was far less forthcoming as she was labelled a loose cannon.
The Queen, knowing Diana had expressly stated it was "not her wish" to be divorced from Charles, wrote to her daughter-in-law insisting that divorce was now imperative.
Had Diana lived on, carving out her niche as the royal humanitarian, having relationships, perhaps even marrying again, the interview would have been only one blip in a full and varied life.
Perhaps the most far-reaching consequence of that Panorama programme is that, for millions of people, the defining image of Diana is a woebegone, frightened face filling the television screen.
Copyright 2004 EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS
Date: 16/06/2004
Publication: Express
