Cyclists are the Jeremy Corbyns of the road

Three years ago next month, the journalist Andy Webb put in a Freedom of Information request to the BBC. He asked for material which he believes would expose a new cover-up of the BBC’s behaviour over Martin Bashir’s notorious 1995 Panorama interview with Diana, Princess of Wales. The cover-up in question (there was a much earlier one shortly after the interview first aired) took place, he believes, between September and November 2020, and involved the BBC’s decision to release certain documents, while concealing others. Lord Dyson’s investigation of the saga began shortly afterwards. Some documents which Lord Dyson did see, and published with his report, contain in them clues to other documents which he did not see and led to wider points – for example, the marvellously arresting phrase ‘The Diana story is dead – unless Spencer [Diana’s brother] talks’. Lord Spencer did indeed talk, once he found out he had been falsely and bizarrely accused of conspiring with Bashir in the production of forged bank statements. This untrue accusation was the way the story eventually came out. But the trail leading to some of the most senior people in the BBC has been persistently blocked. Webb’s FoI request was largely refused. His appeal to see material either withheld or redacted will be heard by the relevant tribunal on two days in late June. What is interesting, as well as the search for the truth of the story, is the length to which the BBC is going to prevent this material becoming public. In January, it handed over – with roughly 16,000 redactions and many witholdings – 10,101 pages of data, in 18 volumes, quite possibly the biggest FoI exercise ever conducted, all designed not to reveal but to obscure. By April this year, the BBC had spent £430,034.71 on external legal services alone.