Princess Diana Did Not Regret ‘Panorama’ Interview, Says Biographer; Piers Morgan Agrees

06.04.2022 - 19:47 / variety.com

Naman Ramachandran Despite there being reports to the contrary, Princess Diana did not regret her infamous 1995 interview with Martin Bashir on BBC’s “Panorama” program, according to her biographer Tina Brown. Veteran journalist Brown, who wrote the biography, “The Diana Chronicles,” in 2007, has a new book titled “The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor, the Truth and the Turmoil” releasing imminently. In an excerpt from the book, published in Vanity Fair, Brown describes a meeting with British entrepreneur Gulu Lalvani who had dated Diana shortly before her death.

“I am told by Lalvani that Diana said she had no regrets about the interview and made clear that she had said exactly what she wanted to say on camera. (She even co-opted lines such as “There were three of us in this marriage” from her writer friend Clive James.) “She was pleased about it [the interview],” Lalvani confirmed to me. “She didn’t have a bad word to say about Martin Bashir.

She realized it served her purpose.” She was right. Her “purpose” was to frame herself to the British public as a betrayed woman before the increasingly inevitable divorce from Charles. Opinion polls in the wake of the interview showed support for the princess at 92 percent.

She had the public in the palm of her hand,” writes Brown. “I don’t subscribe to the now pervasive narrative that Diana was a vulnerable victim of media manipulation, a mere marionette tossed about by malign forces beyond her control. While strongly sympathetic to her sons’ pain, I find it offensive to present the canny, resourceful Diana as a woman of no agency, as either a foolish, duped child or the hapless casualty of malevolent muckrakers,” Brown adds.