![\"Earl](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/earl-charles-spencer.png\")
<\/p>\nIn his forthcoming memoir Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, due out tomorrow, Earl Spencer reveals the deep and lasting guilt he carries for not preventing Martin Bashir’s infamous 1995 Panorama interview with Princess Diana.<\/p>\n
The Earl describes Bashir as an “appalling, self-serving fraud” and argues that a “direct line” can be traced from that broadcast to his sister’s fatal car crash two years later.<\/p>\n
“It is to my eternal regret that what I saw as my clear warnings to Diana about Bashir failed to see him off,” he writes.<\/p>\n
The book also triggered a rare rebuke from Buckingham Palace after Spencer claimed the King had told him following Diana’s death: “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.” The Palace responded: “The pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason.”<\/p>\n
In his forthcoming memoir Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, due out tomorrow, Earl Spencer reveals the deep and lasting guilt he carries for not preventing Martin Bashir’s infamous 1995 Panorama interview with Princess Diana.<\/p>\n
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BBC<\/p>\n
According to the memoir, Bashir reached out to Spencer unexpectedly, convincing him they needed to meet urgently while insisting he was not pursuing an interview with the Princess.<\/p>\n
Within days, the journalist travelled to Althorp, the Spencer family seat in Northamptonshire, where he disclosed that he was a committed Christian. A detail that Spencer felt lent him credibility.<\/p>\n
Bashir then set about persuading the Earl that Diana was under surveillance by agents of the British government, presenting what he claimed was documentary proof in the form of bank statements.<\/p>\n
These documents, which he produced “with a flourish,” were subsequently exposed as forgeries, a revelation that would prove central to unravelling the deception behind one of the most consequential television interviews in British broadcasting history.<\/p>\n
![\"Princess](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/princess-diana-and-martin-bashir.jpg\")
The Earl believes that the Panorama interview set in motion a chain of events that led directly to Diana’s death in Paris in August 1997.<\/p>\n
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GETTY<\/p>\n
At a later meeting held at a friend’s flat, with Diana herself present, Bashir reeled off a series of assertions so outlandish that Spencer immediately recognised the journalist could not be trusted.<\/p>\n
“I could not wait to escort Bashir out of my friend’s flat and get him as far away from Diana as possible,” he writes, adding that he apologised to his sister for having wasted her time.<\/p>\n
The Earl believes that the Panorama interview set in motion a chain of events that led directly to Diana’s death in Paris in August 1997.<\/p>\n
“I thought I had said enough after he left the secret meeting in my friend’s flat. But, clearly, I had not,” Spencer writes. “He managed to slide back into Diana’s life, ensnaring her with lies and manipulation.”<\/p>\n
The result was the landmark interview in which Diana famously declared there had been three people in her marriage.<\/p>\n
Spencer contends in the memoir that the Panorama interview set in motion a chain of events that led directly to Diana’s death in Paris in August 1997.<\/p>\n
He points to a specific consequence: Diana’s personal driver was dismissed after Bashir falsely alleged the man was operating as an informant.<\/p>\n
As a result, Henri Paul, an employee of Mohamed Fayed, was behind the wheel on the night of the crash.<\/p>\n
Paul was later found to have been more than three times over the legal drink-drive limit.<\/p>\n
The BBC issued a formal apology in July 2022 to the King, then Prince of Wales, as well as Prince William, Prince Harry and their former nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke, pledging never to broadcast or license the programme again.<\/p>\n
That apology came in the wake of a damning inquiry by Lord Dyson, the former Master of the Rolls, which found the corporation had concealed the “deceitful behaviour” Bashir employed to secure the sit-down with Diana.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In his forthcoming memoir Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, due out tomorrow, Earl Spencer reveals the deep and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":900418,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,79638,134,25441,38930],"class_list":["post-900417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-earl-charles-spencer","tag-entertainment","tag-princess-diana","tag-royal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=900417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900417\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/900418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=900417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=900417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=900417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}