Prince William Has ‘Silenced’ His Mother, Princess Diana’s Biographer Andrew

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Princess Diana’s biographer, Andrew Morton, has told The Daily Beast that the BBC’s announcement that it will never again screen its famous Panorama interview with Princess Diana, at the urging of Prince William, has resulted in Diana being “silenced” by her own son.

Morton penned the defining book of the era, Diana: Her True Story, which Diana secretly co-operated with by smuggling a series of tape-recorded conversations to Morton.

The book was published in 1992, more than three years before the Panorama interview, giving the world an extraordinary insight into Diana’s misery and anger.

Morton defended the Panorama interview as an accurate representation of Diana’s attitudes, fears, and beliefs at the time, notwithstanding clear evidence of underhand and duplicitous behavior by the BBC reporter who conducted the interview, Martin Bashir.

Asked how he responded to William’s call for the interview to never be screened again, a request to which the BBC has now acceded, Morton said: “It is a supreme irony that it is her son who has led the calls to posthumously muzzle Diana, to silence her, to prevent her from being heard, from saying what she spent her life trying to articulate.”

The BBC also agreed to pay damages to several individuals, including William and Harry’s childhood nanny Alexandra Pettifer, then known as Tiggy Legge-Bourke. Bashir falsely told Diana that Pettifer had got pregnant by Prince Charles and had had an abortion.

Bashir’s methods, an inquiry last year headed by retired British judge Lord Dyson found, were calculated to feed Diana’s paranoia, and included showing her and her brother forged bank statements to convince them they were being spied on by the British security services and betrayed by their staff. Last weekend, Earl Spencer said he had felt “groomed” by Bashir, and called for a new police investigation.

Morton has done much to shine a light on Bashir’s malfeasance; his 2003 book, Diana: In Pursuit of Love, devoted two full chapters to Bashir’s machinations.

Morton said: “Martin did contribute to her sense of paranoia, and her sense of being watched and so on. It was a febrile atmosphere at the time. We regularly swept Diana’s rooms at Kensington Palace for bugs. But Diana wasn’t the only one who was suspicious. The queen was baffled and concerned by the tapes that kept appearing. As well as the Charles and Camilla ‘tampon’ tape, there was ‘Squidgygate’ [in which Diana was taped talking to a friend candidly about a range of private matters] and a tape of [Prince] Andrew and Sarah [Ferguson] talking about their private lives.

“It’s understandable to conclude, when you have three intimate conversations by members of the royal family appearing on tape, that it is more than a coincidence, that it is a conspiracy.”

Morton writes in Diana: In Pursuit of Love that Prince Philip explicitly threatened Diana that there was a tape of her discussing newspaper serializations for Her True Story. Diana shrugged it off, as she had not had any such conversations, but the anecdote amply illustrates the climate of fear and suspicion that pervaded the palace in the 1990s, and goes some way to explain why Bashir was so easily able to convince Diana she was being spied on.

However Morton believes that attempts by Prince William to discredit the interview—he said it has “no legitimacy” and “established a false narrative” in a video address (below) after the Dyson report was published—were completely wrong.

Morton said: “This is an important, historic interview that should be part of the public record. No accurate history or documentary of Diana can be made without referencing that interview. What she said was not an aberration; indeed, much of the ground it covered had been revealed in my book, Diana, Her True Story. For the BBC to lock it away in a vault is wrong.”

Morton said: “The methods Martin Bashir used to get Diana to sit down and talk to him were underhand and deceptive, but the truth is that once the cameras were rolling, he didn’t twist her arm to say anything, and many of the things she said, such as discussing her bulimia, her suicide attempts, her husband’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles and the fact that she didn’t consider him fit to be King, were not aberrations. She was well known for saying these things to those in her circle, to the extent that they had become a kind of schtick.

“And they were all in my book, which had appeared three years previously. Panorama was a televised version of Diana: Her True Story. With the exception of the revelation about her affair…