Panorama

THERE are moments when an institution’s mask slips so completely that it can never truly be put back on. Former BBC journalist Andy Webb’s scorching book Dianarama, published last week, is such a moment for the BBC.

On top of the unfolding and escalating scandal about the Prescott dossier, which concludes that the BBC Board (and its predecessors, the Trustees and the Governors) were and are incapable and arguably unwilling to properly police accuracy, impartiality and good enough practice, Webb’s forensic reconstruction of the Martin Bashir scandal not only exposes his original deceit in 1995, but shatters the manufactured history the BBC has spent nearly 30 years carefully layering over it.

Now — true to form — it emerged this week that the BBC is already trying to rewrite the rewrite. The Corporation’s latest coverage of Webb’s book, posted in predictably defensive tones on its own website, would have you believe this is a story long resolved, its shame confessed, its wounds healed.

‘Lord Dyson established what happened,’ it insists, as if the BBC had been dragged kicking and screaming into truth-telling and is now eager to move on, chastened and cleansed. But this is merely the BBC’s latest falsehood in a saga of cover-up and deception going back to 1995. The crucial truth the BBC avoids mentioning — indeed, arguably the truth it relies on the public forgetting — is that Lord Dyson was never allowed to investigate the full scandal. The BBC engineered a narrow, tightly fenced brief that narrowly focused almost solely on then director of news Tony Hall’s botched internal investigation of 1996.

Dyson was barred from examining the BBC’s conduct in 1995, when the forged bank statements were deployed. He was barred from examining the BBC’s long-term behaviour between 1996 and 2020. He was barred from scrutinising destroyed records, vanished memos, suspicious archive gaps, and two decades of misleading press statements. The Corporation hired Dyson to examine a single chapter and now pretends he otherwise delivered a clean bill of health.

Webb, unrestrained by BBC lawyers or corporate boundaries, has produced the account Dyson could never have written. It is the missing autopsy report, the one the BBC hoped would never exist.

And what Dianarama reveals is devastating. Far from a lone reporter’s deception, the Bashir affair emerges as a multi-layered, multi-year conspiracy of silence. Forged bank statements which outrageously suggested that Diana could not trust the key figures in her household were merely the spark.

The real conflagration was the institutional response, one that involved BBC editors who doubted Bashir’s story but waved it through, multiple senior executives who saw red flags but closed their eyes and have never been held to account, an internal investigation designed not to uncover the truth but to bury it, and a senior leadership, including four director generals, who knowingly misled the public for 30 years.

Perhaps the most disturbing revelation is that the BBC’s cover-up did not age, weaken, or fray over time. It calcified. It broadened. It became part of the BBC’s DNA in how it handled complaints.

Files quietly disappeared. BBC lawyers stonewalled Freedom of Information requests. Press officers recycled denials they knew were untrue. Successive DGs inherited the lie and decided, consciously or not, to maintain it. The BBC did not merely fail Diana. It failed the British public, over and again, while insisting with astonishing arrogance that it is the guardian of national truth and journalistic integrity.

And now, as Webb forensically sets out the fuller, darker story the BBC suppressed, the Corporation has responded in the same way it always does: by belittling, minimising and reframing.

Its latest website piece seeks to cast Webb’s findings as curious ‘background’, interesting ‘detail’ and helpful ‘context’ to the supposedly authoritative Dyson report. This is not transparency. This is cynical, deceptive crisis management — the BBC’s attempt to contain Webb’s revelations before they infect the wider debate about its failed culture, its collapsed leadership, and its dangerous power.

This behaviour is not a relic of the 1990s. It is the BBC’s operating model today. The same culture that lied to Diana caused Panorama to broadcast a doctored Trump speech — and then hid that fact for six months.

The same managerial instincts that closed ranks around Bashir have also dictated the Corporation’s distorted Gaza coverage, its climate alarmism orthodoxy, its systematic smearing of mainstream opinion as ‘far-right’, and its treatment of legitimate public complaints as irritants to be neutralised.

The same BBC that deceived a vulnerable princess continues to deceive the nation under the comforting slogan of ‘impartiality’.

The Corporation claimed at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport select committee on Monday (called to look at the Prescott dossier) that its internal scrutiny processes would be reformed and that the Corporation was ready to introduce better accountability.

The truth is that an institution which still cannot tell the truth about its greatest scandal is not reformed; it is unreformable from within. BBC chairman Samir Shah’s testimony to the committee was yet more window-dressing and mealy-mouthed assurances. Committee chairman Carol Dinenage was right to claim on the Today programme on Tuesday that the BBC is not in safe hands.

Andy Webb has done what the BBC paid Lord Dyson not to do: he has shown the extent of the internal rot and lack of accountability. He has revealed the breadth of the complicity, the longevity of the cover-up, and the continued dishonesty of the Corporation’s public narrative. He has proved that the BBC is incapable of policing itself, incapable of honest self-reflection, and incapable of telling the truth when the truth threatens its power.

The Bashir affair did not end in 1996. It did not end in 2021 with the Dyson report. It will not end until Parliament ends the system that allowed it to happen: a broadcaster funded by compulsion, protected by statute, and permitted to investigate itself.

Diana deserved the truth. Britain deserves the truth. Andy Webb has now shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the BBC will never give it unless it is forced to.

THE Lord Dyson report established that the BBC acted appallingly in its handling in 1995 of the interview of Princess Diana.

Prince William reacted by stating that it showed his mother had been ‘deceived’ and asserted that ‘the ripple effect of (the BBC’s) culture of exploitation and unethical practices ultimately took her life’. He also said: ‘She was failed not just by a rogue reporter, but by leaders at the BBC who looked the other way rather than asking tough questions.’

Serious charges indeed from the second in line to the throne. But who was to blame in this catalogue of coercion, forgery, gross professional incompetence and cover-ups?

Why had Martin Bashir been, in effect, cleared of misconduct in 1996 even though he owned up soon after the interview to forging documents? Who were the ‘leaders’ at the BBC who had looked the other way? And why was Bashir, a proven liar, re-hired by the BBC as religious affairs editor in 2016?

That was what the Department of Culture (DCMS) select committee sought to find out last week. Summoned to appear before the MPs were Lord Birt, director general of the BBC in 1995, Lord Hall, the then director of BBC News (and director general from 2012-20), along with Tim Davie, the current director general and Richard Sharp, the current BBC chairman.

How did the committee, chaired by Conservative MP Julian Knight, fare in its task? You can judge for yourself here from the 32,000 words or so of transcript.

Put bluntly, it was a textbook example of BBC stonewalling and obfuscation. Far from owning up to failures of leadership, the corporation doubled down in its insistence that such was not the case.

One element stands out like a Belisha beacon. This was that, according to the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the inquiry, the Lords Birt and Hall – both looking like insolent schoolboys called to see the headmaster – Martin Bashir was the villain of the piece. He was a rogue reporter, a conman and a charlatan who had lied and practised deception on a monumental scale, and had duped senior management into trusting him.

Was anyone else at the BBC at fault? They themselves? Other senior management figures such as the editor of Panorama, who broadcast the show and was thus editorially responsible for the content as well as the conduct of his staff?

Goodness me, no! In both lords’ views, the actions of the main senior management figures involved – Steve Hewlett, the editor of Panorama, Tim Gardam, the head of current affairs, Tim Suter, the managing editor of all BBC news and current affairs, Richard Ayre, the director of BBC editorial standards, and Anne Sloman, the BBC chief political adviser – were beyond reproach.

Not only that, said the two peers of the realm, they had talked the matter through among themselves and with Steve, the two Tims, Richard and Anne, and all agreed they were on the right track and had handled matters correctly. That, they believed, proved that no one was to blame for the fiasco. They knew it to be the case and, lo! – it therefore was.

The MPs on the committee – some of them former BBC staff, including chairman Knight, the SNP’s John Nicholson and Steve Brine – pulled no punches in their attempt to hold Lords Birt and Hall to account. Their tenacity was impressive.

They may have failed in their task of obtaining direct confessions, but in response to their efforts, Hall and Birt did some monumental buck-passing. They showed that then, as now, the BBC is a disgrace to journalism, that those who run it are arrogantly unaware of their shortcomings and that as an institution, the BBC is rotten to the core with shared values of the gutter.

After the Dyson report appeared, on TCW and Briefings for Britain I wrote:

‘Don’t hold your breath [expecting reform] . . . The danger is that despite the evidence of incompetence, almost unlimited arrogance and moral turpitude, the corporation carries on regardless because no one has the political guts or will to tackle a massive overhaul. The core problem is that the BBC will never admit misconduct, and has been immune to outside complaints for most of its history because it is its own judge and jury in that domain in most respects.’

The testimonies of Lord Birt, Lord Hall, Tim Davie and Richard Sharp are remarkable for the reasons already outlined above, but they deserve further analysis in future blogs, and these will appear on TCW in the coming weeks.

As a taster, current director general Davie revealed that – although he never discussed Bashir with him – he ‘fairly regularly’ talks to Lord Birt, and believes him to be ‘a wise and trusted source of advice for me around how we reform the BBC, how we go through this job’.

Be afraid, be very afraid. The man who in 1993 playwright Dennis Potter called a ‘croak-voiced Dalek’ in his approach to BBC management and reform still has a hand on the tiller almost 30 years on.

BBC Bias Digest

‘Dianarama’ – the conspiracy of deceit exposé that should sign the BBC’s death warrant

Hall and Birt deny responsibility for Bashir fiasco