The BBC is declining to disclose a potentially impactful letter sent by Buckingham Palace just days before airing Martin Bashir’s groundbreaking Panorama interview with Princess Diana.
The Mail on Sunday has uncovered that this document, concealed in BBC archives for thirty years, was directed to the then-director general John Birt four days before the 1995 broadcast.
This correspondence was composed during an exceptionally tense period in the relationship between the Palace and the BBC.
Just days earlier, Diana had confessed to royal aides that she had granted Bashir an exclusive interview about the breakdown of her marriage to Prince Charles.
The existence of the letter – which is understood to have come from the Queen’s office – was confirmed in 10,000 pages of heavily redacted documents finally released by the BBC last week.
It followed a long-running freedom of information battle between the corporation and investigative journalist Andy Webb over emails between BBC bosses when the astonishing scale of Bashir’s deceit became known in 2020.
Last night, historians and campaigners called on the corporation to end its ‘cover-up’ and release the Palace letter and all other documents in full.
The MoS can reveal the document was sent to Lord Birt on November 16, 1995.
It’s known that Lord Birt, at the insistence of the Princess, had decided not to tell BBC chairman Marmaduke Hussey about the interview for fear that Hussey would tell his wife who was a senior lady-in-waiting to the Queen.
The newly released files refer to ‘Letter from Palace to DG – withheld in full’ and the date, but not the document itself.
The timing is intriguing. The Queen was known to have been furious about the Panorama interview.
After it was broadcast in 1995, the monarch removed the BBC’s exclusive rights to the production of her annual Christmas broadcast, which was seen as an act of revenge.
The Panorama episode was watched by more than 20 million viewers. Soon afterwards, the Queen wrote to Charles and Diana urging them to divorce.
