The BBC boss who DID care for Princess Diana: Chairman wanted John Birt to quit as director-general

A former BBC chairman tried to force the resignation of the director-general over Princess Diana‘s interview, it emerged yesterday.

Marmaduke Hussey was horrified by the broadcaster’s secret Panorama interview with the Princess of Wales, recorded without the knowledge of Buckingham Palace.

He asked BBC governors to condemn the interview and the conduct of then director-general John Birt and attempted to force his resignation.

Lord Birt told a documentary: ‘The chairman set out to unseat me. He immediately sought to take action against me.’

Executives did not tell Lord Hussey about the interview until the last minute because they feared he might stop the broadcast. The Tory peer resigned two months later and wrote in his memoir that the episode had ‘darkened my last months at the BBC’.

He was known to be a Prince Charles ‘loyalist’ and had close links to the Royal Family as his wife Lady Susan is a lady-in-waiting to the Queen.

The decision not to tell Lord Hussey, who died in 2006, was discussed in a BBC documentary filmed to mark the tenth anniversary of Diana’s interview with journalist Martin Bashir.

Lord Birt told the 2005 BBC2 Arena documentary: ‘[Hussey] tried to get the governors to condemn the programme, which they refused to do.

‘Having failed at that he tried to get the governors to condemn the way in which I had handled the programme and particularly the fact that I hadn’t alerted him as chairman. He failed to get what he wanted: a stinging rebuke which, he calculated, would force my resignation.’

The documentary, The Princess and Panorama, was shown to former High Court judge Lord Dyson as part of his investigation into the 1995 interview.

He found that Bashir had deceived Diana and her brother Earl Spencer to get the interview and that a subsequent BBC investigation had covered up the scandal.

Such was the level of secrecy about the Panorama interview that Bashir entered Kensington Palace disguised as a salesman.

Diana told Buckingham Palace about it only after the interview was recorded as she reportedly feared that the broadcast might be halted if the palace had known about it earlier.

Tim Gardam, who was the BBC’s head of weekly news and current affairs at the time, said executives had all believed that Lord Hussey, known as ‘Duke’, would have alerted Buckingham Palace if he had known of the planned broadcast.

Lord Birt told the documentary: ‘Marmaduke Hussey was a Prince Charles loyalist, he was increasingly concerned about Princess Diana. On a number of occasions he tried to poison her reputation with me.’

In the 2005 Arena programme, BBC executives heaped praise on Bashir, even though it had already emerged that he had used faked bank statements to woo Earl Spencer into introducing him to Diana.

Lord Hall was head of news at the time and oversaw a flawed internal investigation into Bashir’s tactics which concluded he was an ‘honourable man’ who had made a lapse with the forged bank documents. He has since admitted his 1996 investigation ‘fell short of what was required’ and resigned as chairman of the National Gallery.

The BBC has carried out an investigation over its decision to re-hire Bashir in 2016, when Lord Hall was director-general. It is expected to report back this week.