Princess Diana "pleased" with BBC Panorama interview

[It was the interview that put the final nail in the coffin of Prince Charles and Princess Diana's long marriage. But according to a new book by Tina Brown, longtime royal biographer and former editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, Diana had no regrets about her BBC Panorama interview with Martin Bashir.

Not only did Princess Diana not regret the interview, she was "pleased" with it and "never said a bad word" about Bashir, writes Brown in her forthcoming book, The Palace Papers, to be released later this month. In this explosive interview, Diana speaks candidly about her broken marriage to Charles, from whom she had been separated since 1992. Diana's famous line, "There were three people in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded," came from this interview. (Last year, Lord Dyson reported that Bashir had deceived Diana's brother in order to get the interview. Diana's sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, later spoke out forcefully about the interview in separate statements.)

In addition to his new book, Brown also wrote the 2007 "Diana Chronicle," in which Diana's friends "said what she wanted to say on camera. It was clear that she said exactly what she meant," they wrote.

"I do not subscribe to the now widespread narrative that Diana was a vulnerable victim of media manipulation, a mere marionette at the mercy of malevolent forces beyond her control," Brown wrote.

"While I strongly sympathize with my sons' pain, I find it offensive to present the witty and resourceful Diana as a woman without any agency, either a foolish and deluded child or an unfortunate victim of malicious muckrakers."[6

In July 1997, just one month before Diana was killed in a Paris car crash in August 1997, Brown (then editor-in-chief of The New Yorker), Diana, and Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour sat down for a power lunch that could not have been more different.

"I was overwhelmed by her confident, skillful seduction," Brown wrote. Diana was always more beautiful in person than in pictures." Large, clear blue eyes, soft peach-colored skin, and supermodel-like height. Twenty-four years before Harry and Meghan's incoherent multimedia plan, she switched to a remarkably sophisticated vision of her plan to leverage her celebrity for a cherished cause in a series of television specials."

Unfortunately, the princess never lived to see that plan come to fruition.