Diana

It's strange that the tabloids react with fury when a BBC journalist uses tabloid tactics to generate a story. Perhaps they're simply annoyed they didn't think of it first.

Using lies and deception to obtain a story is the stock in trade of the British tabloids, and few people bat an eyelid - it's come to be expected. For a BBC journalist to do this, however, is egregious in the extreme, albeit having happened 25 years ago. To cover it up for decades compounds the felony.

However, rather than solving the problem by handing control of the BBC to a government that uses lies as a matter of policy, would it not be better to simply put processes and procedures in place to ensure it never happens again? There again, I await with trepidation the announcement of The Ministry of Truth, in true Orwellian style.

Selling off the BBC is not a solution either, as it would stand a very high chance of being grabbed by the very organisations who have little respect for the truth, which again would play directly into the hands of the Conservative Party and not resolve the problem at hand.

William and Harry are naturally incensed at what happened, but William calling for the interview to be buried forever is simply the reaction of a young man wanting to protect his mother and hence entirely understandable and human, if misplaced, in my judgement.

Nothing in the interview was, to my knowledge, lies - it was already freely available through the book written about her, with her complete co-operation. She was, by all accounts, determined to do an interview in reaction to Charles' prior interview, just to get her side of the story out into the public domain - she'd already approached Max Hastings (who refused to have anything to do with her material) before she got involved with Panorama. It was a matter of revenge. The manner in which the interview was gained did not change the essence of what was said, but arguably hurried it along a bit and - yes - the method used to secure it did, in all probability, contribute to a feeling of paranoia.

To bury the interview would merely silence Diana, and too many women, especially in Royal circles, have been silenced in the past by a patriarchal institution run by male flunkies eager to protect the Monarch by whatever means possible, sometimes to the annoyance of the Royals themselves. Has anyone ever heard Mrs Simpson's story, except through the prism of the Monarchical Firm's narrative?

What's a pity about Bashir and the BBC is that they've handed the government a stick to beat them with and divert attention from the total mess they've created and their aim to control the narrative in a manner that sustains them in power. The press in Britain may well be free, but it's predominantly hideously biased at the gutter end of the spectrum and stoops to nothing to support the Tory Party and its aim to demolish the country of my fathers - well, half of them at least.

The story may have been obtained by lies, but the story itself was not a tissue of lies. Give me a list of BBC lies and I'll respond with a list of Johnson government lies that's larger by several orders of magnitude.