Dianarama, the book that exposes the madness of the House of Windsor

As recounted by the journalist Andy Webb in his newly published book Dianarama, when the plane made its landing, “The main wheels locked and smoke billowed and the tyres melted with the friction… a tyre in the right main undercarriage exploded… then a tyre on the left undercarriage burst”. With fire engines in hot pursuit, “the aeroplane slid from the runway, the undercarriage biting deep into the soft ground before collapsing.”

At first glance, an eye-popping account of an almost catastrophic whoopsie appears unrelated to the substance of Webb’s book. But after closing the covers on his tubthumping story of the fraudulent means by which Martin Bashir secured his 1995 Panorama interview with Princess Diana, and the subsequent cover-up by the Lords and Sirs of the BBC’s high command, it occurred to me that an amuse bouche about a have-a-go pilot endangering the lives of himself and others is the perfect introduction to the madness that follows. 

In 1994, the story was forgotten almost as soon as it happened. That very evening, during the two-and-a-half-hour documentary Charles: The Private Man, The Public Role, on ITV, the Prince of Wales made a public admission of adultery with Camilla Parker Bowles. In a telling illustration of the strange metric of British life, at a stroke, the codependents of monarchy and media decided that sex was a more valuable currency than twisted metal. A large section of the public seemed to agree. 

Webb goes on to report how Martin Bashir inveigled himself into the orbit of Princess Diana. Using her brother Charles Spencer (upon whose testimony this book is a little too reliant) as a conduit, the then junior reporter used forged documents, lies and slander with which to coerce the Earl’s otherwise media-savvy sister into detonating a bomb at the heart of the British establishment. 

With the fuse smouldering unseen, 17 months later, an audience of 23 million viewers watched in astonishment as the doe-eyed assassin questioned whether her estranged husband was fit to be King. 

That the publication of Dianarama has handed yet another Louisville Slugger to sections of the media for whom committing assault and battery on the BBC is a favoured pastime need not concern us. In what is an authoritative and entirely thorough piece of journalism, in this telling, the national broadcaster is bang to rights.

Not only were the higher-ups at the corporation made aware of Bashir’s unethical manoeuvrings as early as 1996, but the internal Dyson Inquiry, a quarter of a century later, was itself an exercise in arse-covering and “plausible” deniability. In going to war against a very British brand of whitewash and obfuscation, Webb has shone light into dark and fetid corners. 

For readers who may find themselves lost in the weeds of subterfuge and suspicion, the author, himself a BBC reporter for 15 years, even grants us the favour of making the moral to his story explicitly clear. “Because of what Martin Bashir had done in 1995,” he writes, “and more importantly because it had then been covered up, Diana’s life had been set off on a terribly dangerous course, resulting in her death.”

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To this, it might be added that a con can only succeed if its seeds are planted on fertile soil. As hypnotically charming as he may have been, the reason Bashir was able to persuade Diana that her closest associates were selling secrets for scores of thousands of pounds, and that the security services were planning to kill her, was because her scene was already thick with mistrust, dysfunction and paranoia. The details of her strange and poisonous world beg a fundamental question: “What purpose is served by so much dangerous nonsense?”

Whether by accident or design, Dianarama offers at least as devastating a critique of the madness of Royal life itself as it does the BBC. As with the recent book Entitled: The Rise And Fall Of The House Of York by Andrew Lownie, its tales of avarice, cruelty, pettiness and unearned privilege offer succour to anyone who favours doing away with this sinister and infantilising anachronism altogether. I feel I should offer my thanks; between them, the two authors have done almost as much damage to the Royal brand as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. 

Because, seriously, these people are crazy. In 1997, in the wake of the death of Princess Diana, the House of Windsor employed children as a human shield with which to protect itself from the threat posed by a public whose sense of grief shivered with instability and violence. Twenty-eight years after walking behind his mother’s coffin, for Prince Harry, the rage continues to resonate. 

Thinking back on these times, I’m reminded, too, of words spoken by Christopher Hitchens that today serve as an unwitting epigram for the moreish story laid out by Andy Webb. “There is an alternative to this,” he said. “It’s summed up in the injunction, ‘Get a life’.”

Dianarama by Andy Webb is published by Penguin Michael Joseph