The Crown’s fifth season finds the War of the Waleses being fought on a new battleground: in the press. The latest season chronicles the mounting media battle between Princess Diana and Prince Charles that preceded their 1996 divorce. First, Diana secretly collaborated with Andrew Morton on the explosive tell-all, Her True Story—detailing her marital unhappiness, struggle with bulimia, and suicide attempts. In response, Charles returned public fire by conducting a sit-down interview with the BBC’s Jonathan Dimbleby, confirming his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles and explaining his side of the marital story. And in the sixth episode, “No Woman’s Land”—which finds Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) more paranoid, vulnerable, and vengeful than ever following Charles’s on-camera confessional—an ominous real-life figure makes his grand entrance: Martin Bashir, as played by Prasanna Puwanarajah.
Series creator Peter Morgan had plenty of captivating historical material to draw from for the period drama’s new season, which spans the royal scandal-rich period of 1991 to 1997. But the Bashir story line—which stretches into the following episode, “Gunpowder”—feasts on the journalist’s real-life manipulation of Diana, some details of which were only unearthed last year when Lord John Dyson, a former justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, released a damning 127-page report on the deceitful tactics used to score the 1995 Panorama interview, during which Diana famously commented, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded,” alluding to Camilla and Charles’s long-standing affair. Diana also confirmed her own marital infidelity in the interview.
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To secure the sensational sit-down, as shown on The Crown, Bashir first wooed Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer. As the Dyson report notes, during an initial meeting, the then largely-unknown journalist presented Spencer with phony bank statements purportedly showing that several of his and Diana’s employees had accepted payments from a newspaper publisher, presumably to spy on and report about their royal bosses. Spencer, as explained in the Dyson report, said that he trusted Bashir because of his BBC association and because of what appeared to be authentic bank statements, which he called the “absolute clincher.” The documents had twin effects according to Tina Brown in The Diana Chronicles: “Bashir simultaneously established his trustworthiness and credibility with the Spencers and [later] strengthened Diana’s resolve to keep everything she was doing secret from people who might try to dissuade her.”
The statements, it was later revealed, were actually mocked up by a freelance graphic designer at Bashir’s request. “I mean, I was duped,” Spencer is quoted as saying in the Dyson Report.
According to the Dyson report, it was because of Bashir’s successful deception that Spencer made the introduction to his sister, Diana. Once in contact with Diana, Bashir reportedly doubled down on his manipulation efforts—stoking Diana’s paranoia with further false reports about insiders’ betrayals. As reported by The Telegraph, Bashir even claimed that Prince William and Harry’s nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke had an affair with Prince Charles by showing Diana a fake receipt for what he said was the nanny’s abortion. (Earlier this year, the BBC publicly apologized to Legge-Bourke for the “serious and prolonged harm” that the false allegations caused her, and agreed to pay her an undisclosed settlement.) “Bashir also told Diana that she shouldn’t trust [her friends] Catherine Soames, Kate Menzies, and Julia Samuel,” wrote royal biographer and former Vanity Fair contributor Sally Bedell Smith in the biography Diana in Search of Herself. “He probably figured that all three women were independent-minded as well as discreet, and would have cautioned Diana against cooperating with him.”
As is depicted on The Crown and included in the Dyson report, Spencer began to doubt Bashir’s credibility after comparing contemporaneous notes from his first and second meetings with the journalist, and finding small discrepancies. “I then immediately apologized to Diana for having wasted her time,” Spencer is quoted as saying in the report, “and explained that I believed Bashir to be a fantasist or a fraud and told her why. I didn’t know if he was a liar or a fantasist, but I knew he was bad news, in my opinion, and that was the end of him for me.”
But Diana did not listen. As Smith wrote in Diana in Search of Herself, “Bashir had struck a nerve with Diana, who had long suspected she was being spied on by the royal family.”