Princess Diana and her husband Prince Charles were a doomed couple from the start. But even with the latter waiting in the wings for his true love, the now-Duchess Camilla of Cornwall, the late Princess of Wales ought to be alive today.
The palace treated Diana abhorrently from the start. But the paranoia that led to her death was falsely and maliciously sown by Martin Bashir, who sought to secure a salacious interview with her for the BBC’s Panorama series.
More than a quarter-century after the BBC interview blew up the royal family, a retrospective inquiry into the interview concluded that Bashir and his team did indeed falsify documents to coerce the princess into an interview. Despite a sham 1996 investigation the BBC conducted to cover its own tracks, Thursday’s revelations proved that Bashir pressured Diana with fabricated bank statements claiming to prove that the royal employees were spying on her.
The true fallout of Bashir’s interview wasn’t that she and Charles, already then legally separated, would go on to divorce. A marriage between a promiscuous and moody crown prince and the only eligible bachelorette he hadn’t yet deflowered was never going to end well. But Bashir’s deception fed into the ultimately fatal fear Diana had of being secretly monitored by the royal family.
After the divorce, Diana rejected the royal security she was entitled to as a still-active member of the royal family. The princess was insistent that the crown was attempting to spy on her and instead relied on the security provided by her boyfriend’s father, Mohamed al Fayed, at the time of her death.
A royal protection officer would have never allowed Diana to go into a car without being properly seat-belted, much less with a driver intoxicated at more than three times the legal limit. But the night of her death, that’s what Fayed’s security allowed to happen, and as a result, Diana lost her life.
Diana’s sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, may continue to spar across the pond, but on one matter, they’re in agreement and correct. The gross journalistic malpractice of the BBC did indeed contribute to the “fear, paranoia, and isolation” that ultimately led her to reject the royal security that could have prevented her death.
