Did Panorama use tabloid methods to lure Diana?

As time passes, there is — blessedly — ever less need to pay attention to ‘untold’ stories about Diana, Princess of Wales; but the Channel 4 documentary Diana: The Truth behind the Interview did make me sit up a bit. It revealed, and the BBC does not deny, that Martin Bashir and Panorama colleagues caused fake invoices to be created purporting to show that a rogue employee of Charles Spencer, the Princess’s brother, had sold stories about her to newspapers. It seems this forgery — and Panorama’s assurances about Bashir’s good character — persuaded Lord Spencer to meet Bashir and to urge his sister to do the same. The result was the world-famous 1995 interview (‘There were three of us in this marriage’) which tried to undermine Prince Charles’s succession to the throne. The Queen immediately wrote to both parties requesting they settle their divorce fast. Lord Spencer was not interviewed in the Channel 4 programme — he gets so many such requests that he usually turns them down — but I thought I would ring him up to get his account.