BBC apologises to Royal nanny over false Prince Charles affair allegations
London: She was collateral damage in one of the most sensational reporting scoops in British TV history, a royal nanny to Prince William and Prince Harry tarnished by the BBC in its quest for an interview with their mother, Princess Diana.
The BBC apologised to the former nanny, Alexandra Pettifer, then known as Tiggy Legge-Bourke, for spreading false allegations that she had an affair with Prince Charles and had undergone an abortion after becoming pregnant with his child. The BBC also agreed to pay her a substantial, if undisclosed, amount in damages.
Alexandra Pettifer, better known as Tiggy Legge-Bourke, a former nanny to Britain’s Prince Wiliam and Prince Harry, walks outside the High Court.Credit:AP
“These allegations were fabricated,” Pettifer’s lawyer, Louise Prince, read out in a jointly agreed statement in the High Court in London.
The BBC said in the statement that it was “extremely sorry for the serious and prolonged harm” the accusations had caused Pettifer and that they were “wholly baseless” and “should never have been made.”
Pettifer, 57, became a lurid footnote in the soap opera lives of Charles and Diana when an ambitious young BBC journalist, Martin Bashir, began circulating reports about her supposed sexual entanglement with Charles, apparently as a way of winning Diana’s trust so she would give him an exclusive tell-all interview.
Bashir also told Diana that people close to her were selling stories about her to the London tabloids, and he created fake bank statements to undermine a rival news organisation. These underhand methods landed Bashir the interview for the BBC program “Panorama” in 1995, which proved as big a bombshell as the interview that Harry and his wife, Meghan, gave to Oprah Winfrey in March 2021.
Princess Diana during the interview with BBC reporter Martin Bashir, which was broadcast on November 20, 1995.Credit:AP
“There were three of us in this marriage,” Diana famously said to Bashir of her husband and Camilla Parker-Bowles, with whom he had a relationship before and during his marriage and whom he later married.
The program has since become a festering source of shame and expense for the BBC. The broadcaster has apologised to the royal family, paid damages to other people discredited by it and promised never to air it again.
Questions about Bashir’s tactics were raised soon after the interview was broadcast, most vocally by Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer. An internal investigation by the BBC exonerated Bashir, but in 2021, an inquiry conducted by a former justice of the British Supreme Court, Lord John Dyson, concluded that “the BBC fell short of the high standards of integrity and transparency, which are its hallmark.”
On Thursday, the BBC’s director-general, Tim Davie, issued yet another apology to the royal family, as well as a new one to Pettifer.
“It is a matter of great regret that the BBC did not get to the facts in the immediate aftermath of the program, when there were warning signs that the interview might have been obtained improperly,” Davie said. “Had we done our job properly, Princess Diana would have known the truth in her lifetime.”
The BBC, Davie reiterated, will never again broadcast the program or license it to other broadcasters. Because of its historic value, he did not rule out airing extracts from the interview.
Bashir, who went on to report for ABC News and returned to the BBC as a religion correspondent, resigned from the broadcaster in May 2021, citing poor health. He has expressed regret for his methods but insisted they did not ultimately play a role in getting Diana to sit for the interview.
Pettifer was one of a rotating cast of characters in the ceaseless tabloid coverage of Charles and Diana. The daughter of a wealthy banker who served in Royal Horse Guards, she grew up in an aristocratic world of Swiss finishing schools and an ancestral estate in Wales and later opened a nursery school. Charles hired her to be a nanny for his sons shortly after he and Diana separated in 1993.
“Had we done our job properly, Princess Diana would have known the truth in her lifetime.”
Newspapers leaped on rumours that Diana objected to Pettifer’s child care practices — she smoked while taking care of William and Harry — and passed along secondhand accounts of her views about what the young princes really needed (“fresh air, a rifle and a horse”), The Guardian reported in 1999.
But there was never any corroboration of the rumours that the nanny had become involved with the boys’ father.
In 1999, she resigned from the household of Charles and married Charles Pettifer, a former officer in the Coldstream Guards. William and Harry, who were said to adore her, attended their wedding.
In a statement published by The Sunday Times, Alexandra Pettifer said, “I am disappointed that it needed legal action for the BBC to recognise the serious harm I have been subjected to.” She said that she knew “firsthand” how much the Diana interview had affected the royal family and that their distress “is a source of great upset to me.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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