Call it a bonfire of the vanities. Normally the BBC likes nothing more than a chance to talk about the failings of the BBC, but it’s not so keen when others get in on the act. Especially when those others are clued-up members of the digital, culture, media and sport select committee and the subject matter is Martin Bashir. By the time the nearly four-hour marathon session was concluded, all that was left of two former directors general of the BBC was a pile of ashes on the carpet. First up before the committee was Tony Hall, who had been director of news when Bashir’s interview with Diana, Princess of Wales was broadcast in 1995 and director general when Bashir was rehired as religious affairs editor in 2016. The committee chair, Julian Knight, didn’t waste time on niceties. No “thank you for coming”, just why had Lord Hall concluded that Bashir was a decent and honourable man in his 1996 investigation despite having uncovered evidence that documents had been forged to secure the interview?
It wasn’t quite like this, said a defensive, red-faced Hall. There had been a letter from Diana saying she would have given the interview anyway and had in no way felt manipulated, so he had not deemed the forgeries to have been that important. Besides which, Bashir had assured him they related to another Panorama programme he had hoped to make about how the royal family was being spied on. And it wasn’t as if Martin had used the fakes on air during his broadcast interview. That really might have been a red card offence. Or at least a yellow. Knight was incredulous that Bashir hadn’t been immediately dismissed. Hall shook his head sadly. That wasn’t how the BBC worked. First he had issued some new guidelines for all Beeb journalists in which the importance of not using forgeries to obtain stories had been set out. Then he had sat down to have a heart-to-heart interview – there were three of them in this relationship: Martin, Tony and a fistful of lies – with Bashir. What the committee had to understand was that Bashir was a young and inexperienced reporter – something that might have set alarm bells ringing for some senior news managers – and he had wanted to understand why he had felt the need to to commission some forgeries. The idea that Bashir might just have had an eye on the main chance didn’t seem to have occurred to Hall. Instead, his heart had melted when Martin had broken down in tears and he had completely forgotten to do what a normal hack would have done and see if his story checked out with Earl Spencer. That, though, was Hall at his most coherent. When it came to explaining how Bashir came to be rehired during his tenure as director general, Hall was a babbling wreck. Knight tried to make some sense of the timeline. Three people had submitted their CVs for the job of religious affairs editor from within the BBC and all three had been rejected as unsuitable. The Beeb had then advertised externally and had received 18 applications, only one of which – Bashir’s – had been deemed worthy of an interview. Then one of the internal applicants who had already been rejected was invited to go for an interview along with Bashir and to nobody’s great surprise Mart was offered the job. To add to the sense of the surreal, Bashir made only six appearances during his five years as religious correspondent at a conservative estimate of £40K per outing – he spent more time on air in The X Factor: Celebrity during that period – and was allowed to freelance for ITV. Nice work if you can get it.
“If we’d known then what we know now, then we’d never have rehired him,” said Hall. It seemed to have slipped his mind that he had been one of the many people at the BBC who had known exactly what sort of person Bashir was, because he’d already investigated him once and found out that he had secured the Diana interview on the back of fake documents. Yet somehow the former director general had never put two and two together and intervened to prevent Bashir from being rehired. Presumably he must have thought this second Martin Bashir was completely unrelated to the first Martin Bashir. By now Hall was just a ruin of his former self. Nor did John Birt, who had been director general at the time of the interview, come away in much better shape after his savaging. His only excuse was that he hadn’t really known anything and had been happy to take it on trust from juniors, such as Hall, that Bashir was basically a good ’un – something those who worked at the Beeb during Lord Birt’s time there would find hard to believe, as his name became a byword for corporate jargon and mistrust. The idea that he would just have taken someone else’s word for the controversy surrounding the most iconic interview in the BBC’s history took some believing. But that was all he had to offer. It wasn’t enough for the committee, who could sense a cover-up and Birt knew it – 25 years was a long time ago, he pleaded. Look on your works ye mighty and despair.