#Worst lies the BBC fed Earl Spencer to get Princess Diana interview

It turns out the venerable BBC not only forged bank accounts to gain access to Princess Diana — but told her brother Charles Spencer a total of 32 outrageous lies in order to secure Diana’s interview.

In October, the BBC apologized to Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, for the journalist Martin Bashir’s use of fake bank statements to lure her into the 1995 Panorama interview she gave after her split from Prince Charles.

The British network finally admitted that Bashir showed Spencer bank statements doctored by a staff graphic designer. Spencer had alleged that Bashir told his sister “fantastical stories to win her trust” and showed him fake bank records which reportedly helped land Bashir the interview.

But now, Spencer has shown his handwritten notes taken in 1995 during Bashir’s onslaught to the Daily Mail — revealing that the journalist concocted a total of 32 outrageous lies about the Royal Family and it’s staff to secure Diana’s participation in the infamous interview.

The 15 worst lies include:

• Diana’s private correspondence had been intercepted for the previous six months, there was a tracking device in her car, three telephone lines in Kensington Palace were tapped and there was a bug on her car phone.
• She was being followed by security services.
• Her bodyguard was plotting against her, and close friends were betraying her.
• MI6 had recorded Prince Charles and his private secretary planning the “end game.”
• Charles and nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke went on a secret holiday together.
• The heir to the throne was “in love” with the nanny.
• Prince Edward was receiving treatment for AIDS at the Royal Marsden Hospital.
• The Queen was a “comfort eater” with “heart problems.”
• “Prince Philip doesn’t like Diana at all.”
• Prince William, then 13, had been given a special Swatch watch by his father which contained a listening device … part of a “strategy” devised by Prince Charles and his aide.
• Journalists had paid informants at the Chelsea Harbour Club where the Princess worked out, and had created shell companies to hide payments.
• A renowned newspaper employee was a pedophile who had “abused children in a Greenwich children’s home’
• A female journalist slept with one of Spencer’s former employees, who had passed secrets to the journalist.
• A decision had been made to “reinvent” the Prince of Wales and attack Diana.
• Prince Charles had vowed he “would not rest until Victoria (Lockwood, then Earl Spencer’s wife) was six feet under.”

These lies were, according to the Daily Mail, aimed to target Diana’s paranoia and fear that her aides and in-laws could betray her.

Spencer later apologized to his sister for introducing Bashir to her, but she went ahead with the “Panorama” interview in which she notably commented, “there are three of us in this marriage” anyway.

This month is the 25th anniversary of the broadcast, watched by 23 million, which led the Queen to order Charles and Diana to seek a divorce.

“I would suggest that somebody from an external perspective should be involved in the inquiry in some significant way,” Stewart Purvis, a former editor and chief executive of ITN, told BBC Radio 4’s “Today.”

Many think that if Diana hadn’t been persuaded to do the interview, her rocky marriage may have been smoothed over and she would still be alive.