Fred Prouser/Reuters
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Nicholas Witchell, the BBC’s long serving royal correspondent who was famously branded an “awful man” by King Charles on a hot mic, has said that it was he who first suggested to Princess Diana that she do her 1995 interview with the BBC and labelled his former colleague Martin Bashir, who ultimately landed the interview using underhand means, an “absolute blaggard.”
The BBC’s veteran royal correspondent, who is retiring this month, revealed in a farewell interview that he “was the person who put the idea” of doing the Panorama interview into Diana’s head, and added: “I was initially going to be the person to do the interview, and I was twice due to go and have lunch to discuss it with her, but at that stage I had been made aware that this absolute blaggard called Martin Bashir had entered the picture,” he told the Daily Telegraph.