I wasn’t expecting People Magazine to put this on their cover this week. This year is the 30th anniversary of Princess Diana’s Panorama interview, the infamous interview which echoes through the Windsor clan even today. King Charles has been furious about Diana’s interview for thirty years, and he’s done everything in his power to delegitimize Diana and her words. Charles has had a lot of help in recent years, including his heir, Prince William, who told the world that his mother was paranoid, and that the interview was a major reason why Charles and Diana split up. While I fully acknowledge that Martin Bashir is a lying sack of garbage who manipulated Diana and lied to her, I’m deeply disturbed by the mainstreaming of revisionist history around Diana and her own words and her own choice to tell her side of the story on camera. Speaking of, there’s a book about Diana’s Panorama interview (and everything around it) and the author, Andy Webb, is very loudly pushing revisionist history. Some highlights from People’s exclusive cover story:
Untethered Diana: Webb’s new book Dianarama: Deception, Entrapment, Cover-Up—The Betrayal of Princess Diana (out Nov. 25) lays bare for the first time the full scope of Bashir’s manipulation: luring Diana’s brother Charles Spencer — himself a victim of Bashir’s tactics — to gain access to the princess, presenting forged bank statements suggesting palace staff were spying on her and spreading false claims that Prince Charles wanted to have her killed and William’s watch was a spying device. “Her life became untethered,” Webb tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story. “It was frenzied between the interview and her death. There’s so much that’s new that I wanted to put down in this book — a first draft of history.”
Paranoid princess: Diana had reason to trust Bashir — he worked for one of the world’s most respected news organizations. Already wary of palace officials and shaken by breaches of her privacy — including “Squidgygate,” a secretly recorded phone call that went public in 1992—she felt watched and increasingly isolated. Her former private secretary, Patrick Jephson, tells PEOPLE that “Bashir picked a very opportune moment” to show the faked bank statements to Spencer and convince him that people in Diana’s orbit — including Jephson and a senior aide to Prince Charles — were accepting money to spy on her. “She was in a state of justified anxiety,” says Jephson. “It is not paranoia if you have reasonable grounds to believe that they are out to get you.” Adds close friend Rosa Monckton: “She was frail, and that made her susceptible.”
The Tiggy story: After Spencer, 61, arranged a meeting with Diana, Webb alleges, Bashir falsely told her that her sons’ nanny Tiggy Legge‑Bourke was having an affair with Charles, producing a forged document suggesting she had undergone an abortion paid for by the prince. Those claims were said to be the final catalyst that drove Diana to the interview.
The interview: “It was a performance. The smoothness, the facility, the fluidity — at no point did Diana appear flustered,” Webb says. The now-iconic image of her eyeliner-rimmed stare drew an estimated 200 million global viewers, none aware of the lies behind it. The fallout was immediate. Within a month Queen Elizabeth ordered Charles and Diana to proceed with a divorce. Jephson resigned in January 1996, unaware of why the princess had turned sharply against him. “It is chilling to rerun those events,” Jephson tells PEOPLE, “and feel that Diana was seeing me as the enemy within.”
The consequences of Bashir’s lies: “Her life would have followed a different path if she’d been warned,” Webb continues. “She might plausibly still be alive today — a grandmother at 64, enjoying her five grandchildren. The consequences were lethal.”
Diana’s final year: By the time of that final trip in August 1997, Diana had lost the guidance of her loyal aide. Distrusting palace officials, she had long declined official protection and relied instead on the security provided by then boyfriend Dodi Fayed’s team — a set-up that proved fatally insufficient. Without adequate counsel and protection, Diana was vulnerable in Paris, where she died at 36 in a high-speed crash caused by her driver’s intoxication and reckless driving, amid a chase by paparazzi. “Because Diana had been tricked into distrusting every kind of official protection,” says Jephson, “she put herself in a position where she had to accept the protection of people who were not competent.”
Webb on Prince William & Diana: “William wants transparency, honesty and full disclosure,” he says. Diana never learned the truth. She died unaware of Bashir’s lies and manipulations. “She firmly believes that he was a truth teller,” Webb continues. “Had Diana realized Bashir was a fraudster, everything would have fallen away.”
Diana regretted the interview: Ten days before her death, Princess Diana confided something quietly heartbreaking to one of her closest friends — a private admission about Prince William and Prince Harry that she never had the chance to revisit. During a summer holiday in Greece in August 1997, Diana traveled with close friend Rosa Monckton for what would become their final vacation together. At one point, their conversation turned to Diana’s now-infamous 1995 Panorama interview — the television moment that stunned the world almost two years earlier. “She told me she regretted doing it because of the harm she thought it had done to her boys,” Monckton tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story.
There’s talk of the Dyson investigation, which concluded in 2021, which uncovered a lot of Bashir’s deceptions and falsified documents. But the thing about the Dyson investigation is that there was an acknowledgement, across the board, that Diana wanted to talk and she wanted to go on camera. Diana was weighing different plans of action, and she went with Martin Bashir for reasons which we now know were not above-board on Bashir’s side. What happened between 2021 and 2025 where no one – certainly not author Andy Webb – will acknowledge that Diana wanted to talk to someone? There’s all of this breast-beating about “Diana never would have said these things if Bashir hadn’t lied to her,” but… I’m pretty sure she would have said all of those things to someone else, maybe even Oprah! Bashir’s lies secured the interview, but his lies didn’t put those words in her mouth. Anyway, I hate that 30 years later, a bunch of dudes are recontextualizing Diana’s groundbreaking interview as a cautionary tale for why victims should not speak out. Never forget, ladies: talking about how you were treated like garbage will cost you your life.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.
