A playwright named Jonathan Maitland has written a play called The Interview. It’s all about Martin Bashir’s famous interview with Princess Diana in 1995, the one which was dramatized in The Crown last season, and the one which will never air on the BBC again. The Windsors – specifically King Charles – did the most to bury the interview and silence Diana in her lifetime and in her grave. There was a lengthy investigation into the interview and how Martin Bashir scored the interview (through fraudulent means), and in 2021, the Dyson Report revealed the results of the investigation. Basically, Bashir used deceit to secure the interview, he forged bank records and manipulated Diana. But the Dyson Report also noted (begrudgingly) that Diana was always going to give an interview and it was just a matter of deciding who she would speak to. While Bashir contributed to Diana’s paranoia at the time, he was not the sole reason for her paranoia – she already believed that her phones were being tapped, that she was being monitored, that if something happened to her, it was Charles who gave the orders. Anyway, Maitland is raking over all of this again, and he wrote a piece in the Daily Mail about all of it:

Diana’s bravery: We know about the sensational star quality — apart from Marilyn Monroe, has the camera loved anyone more? — but that interview highlighted Diana’s extraordinary, kamikaze-like bravery. You can think she was wrong to grant Bashir an audience in the first place but still admire the moral courage she showed as a 34-year-old woman, single-handedly taking on the British monarchy, one of the most powerful institutions in the world.

Diana knew what she was doing: There are many who say Bashir manipulated her into it — that she was, in effect, not in her right mind — but I don’t think that’s the case. She knew what she was doing and it’s clear she was always going to grant someone that interview: it was simply a question of who she did it with. Bashir’s deceit didn’t generate the interview itself, it just ensured that it was he who got the gig.

Diana could be capricious. The whole affair highlighted her catastrophic lack of strategic judgment. Her attack on her then husband’s fitness to rule was a terrible error. She told Bashir ‘the top job, as I call it, would bring enormous limitations to him, and I don’t know whether he could adapt to that’. This made her look vindictive. As her former aide Patrick Jephson argues in his book Shadows Of A Princess, had she taken a more diplomatic line throughout the interview, she would have won the PR battle hands down. Jephson thinks she could, and should, have forgiven Charles for his behaviour. Indeed, at least one close friend advised her to do just that. But Diana’s view was, essentially: ‘They need to apologise first.’ It would have been hard, admittedly, but had Diana taken a softer approach it would, in the long term, have helped to establish her as a substantial public figure of grace, wisdom and honesty.

Wow, it’s almost like Maitland is saying Charles killed Diana: Imagine if, instead of saying that the marriage was ‘crowded’, she had said: ‘I was heartbroken by my husband’s affair. But for the sake of my children, the country and the Royal Family, I am prepared to forgive and move on.’ If she had found it in herself to be that shrewd, who knows? She, not Camilla, could now be Queen.

Prince William’s tantrum about the interview: Following the Dyson Report, Prince William said: ‘It is my firm view that this programme holds no legitimacy and should never be aired again.’ The BBC immediately agreed to his request and so the interview is now, in effect, banned. Anyone who uses chunks of it for a documentary, film, or indeed play, runs the risk of being sued for breach of copyright. So that means we can no longer hear, or see, an interview which, despite its dodgy provenance, is a truly historic and significant journalistic document. I can understand why the BBC caved into William but it was supine and undemocratic. The Corporation should reconsider its decision.

He’s basically William Parker-Bowles: How can it be right for a public-service broadcaster devoted to free speech, to censor a revealing interview with one of the 20th century’s most significant figures? It’s ironic that the eldest son she brought up to have the courage to speak out has silenced his own mother… who had the courage to speak out.

[From The Daily Mail]

“The whole affair highlighted her catastrophic lack of strategic judgment. Her attack on her then husband’s fitness to rule was a terrible error.” I’m ready to fight about this – Diana, in 1995, was ready to settle scores, it’s true. Charles had already given his interview to Jonathan Dimbleby where he made it sound like he was forced to marry Diana and that he treated her like a broodmare, only there to provide heirs. Diana was pissed, justifiably so. But has anyone stopped to think that maybe she was telling the truth? That Diana, with all of her emotional intelligence, having seen Charles close up, realized that he would be a terrible king, the kind of short-sighted, vindictive a–hole who would evict Diana’s son from the family home he paid for? The kind of terrible king who would leave the daily staff management to his mistress-wife?

Now, what Maitland says about William is exactly right – William’s tantrum about the interview and insistence that the BBC shelve it forever is Diana’s son silencing her and failing to see her courage and bravery.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images, screencap from GMA/ABC.