Martin Bashir: The tender trap

His television interview with Princess Diana made his name; his reputation for compassion, friendship and understanding secured his Michael Jackson scoop. But now he faces charges of betrayal and deception, and his media colleagues are not exactly lining up in his defence...

It was not only Michael Jackson who emerged from last week's compulsive pop-umentary interview as tarnished goods. The gripping 110-minute TV programme may have been a triumph for its maker, Martin Bashir, attracting 14 million viewers in Britain and a rash of excitable headlines on both sides of the Atlantic – after all, next to the Queen and Osama bin Laden, as one reviewer put it, "Wacko Jacko" would top any interviewer's dream list of subjects. But Bashir must be contemplating his own future with some trepidation as he takes refuge with his wife and three children at home in Winchester, Hampshire, from the media maelstrom he has unleashed.

The 39-year-old devout Christian may have made broadcasting history by single-handedly confirming once and for all that Jackson is sad, mad and maybe even bad. Jackson may indeed be investigated by child-protection agencies as a result. But doubts about Bashir's own integrity have extended – crucially – from the London media world, where there has always been envy of his scoops and his methods of achieving them, into the celebrity circuit. For Bashir this could be devastating, as his entire career since his ground-breaking Panorama interview with the late Diana, Princess of Wales, has depended on his reputation for compassion, friendship and understanding. Jackson's wounded accusations of "betrayal" and "deception" will undoubtedly make it more difficult, even impossible, for Bashir to bag his next high-profile subject.

Like many of Jackson's predecessors, from Louise Woodward, the British nanny accused of murder in the US, to the self-destructing Michael Barrymore, the superstar had been lured into the Bashir trap by the saintly image of Diana. Bashir's first and greatest triumph – the 1995 interview with Diana – could really claim to have changed the course of history. In it she coyly revealed the overcrowded practicalities of "three in a marriage". Soon the Queen was urging Charles and Diana to divorce.

Controversy may still swirl around the exact details of the lead-up to the Diana interview, and there are some in the BBC who decry Bashir's methods. (There remain unanswered questions, for instance, as to why Bashir falsified bank statements relating to Diana's brother's head of security. Did he do this to worm his way into the bosom of the Spencer family?) But what is certain is that Diana talked to Bashir, who had barely made a name for himself in nine years at the BBC. It was a mutually beneficial relationship and he had made himself her friend, her confidant.

"Bashir worked on Diana for years, also getting close to her brother, Earl Spencer," says one former BBC colleague. "He has this gift of persuading people to trust him. It's really uncanny and not something you learn. You're born with it or you're not."

So-called celebrities, from the Stephen Lawrence murder suspects upwards, saw what the Bashir confessional had done for a woman who needed to explain away her own misdemeanours and strengthen her hand for the future. They surmised that he could do the same for them. (He has got rich on it; he is said to earn a six-figure salary and a slice of his programmes' syndication fees.)

Diana won global sympathy and the recognition that she was indeed a powerful force in her own right through the emollient medium of a soft-focus lens and Bashir's treacly line of questioning. Some suggest that their friendship was so intimate that Bashir, whose parents came from Pakistan, later even acted as go-between for Diana and her Pakistani doctor lover, Hasnat Khan. No wonder then that Jackson believed Bashir when he presented himself as "the man who turned Diana's life around".

Bashir courted Jackson for five years, and when finally granted access to the pop legend (after a recommendation from Jackson's friend Uri Geller) set about creating an equally close relationship with the singer. His willingness to take calls from Jackson day or night or drop everything if summoned to the singer's side must have impressed and comforted an eccentric recluse who clearly has riches galore but very few pals – grown-up ones anyway.

Bashir himself seems to have few friends, is intensely private and rarely socialises. He cuts a lonely figure in the office, where he was once written off as an obsessional loser whose ideas never panned out. There has been barely a ripple of applause from his peers when he has picked up various industry awards.

"Martin doesn't see anyone socially. It's hard to see him, he's always off doing stuff on his next project," says one former colleague. "We never got close and I gave up calling him some time ago; he never called back."

Another added: "No one was sorry when he was poached by ITV in 1998. The BBC stood by him over the Diana interview, and she herself wrote a letter saying she had given the interview freely. But a lot of people still felt worried about those bank statements he had had made up by a BBC graphic artist. He never really explained himself, although he insisted they had never been used. That said, the computer disk with them on mysteriously went missing."

Similarly, ITV is now standing by Bashir, despite Jackson's claims that he reneged on undertakings not to show footage of his three children.

Bashir, who was educated at a south London comprehensive and then Southampton University, never makes the mistake of dropping his guard but perhaps draws on the experiences of his own family for his work. He has said little of his early life, but he grew up on a south London council estate where, he says, the only book in his home was the rent book. His brother died of severe muscular dystrophy, and his father suffered from psychiatric problems, while his wife counsels terminally ill patients.

Steve Anderson, ITV controller of news and current affairs, wonders whether Bashir's "real skill is of someone who might otherwise have been a psychologist". Certainly his questioning is more patsy than Paxman sledgehammer; he rarely presses his subjects or tackles their inconsistencies. (Jackson's assertion one minute that he had had a relationship with the mother of his third child, and then later that he had never met her, for instance, went unchallenged. As did his claim that God wrote his pop songs.)

In Diana's case, Bashir was simply the convenient conduit for her bid to become queen of hearts. With Jackson, his questions – and deadpan, comically understated commentary – were almost irrelevant. The singer incriminated himself for 110 minutes without help.

Jackson is not the first Bashir victim to cry foul. The former footballer George Best has branded him "Bash Ear" and complained that at their first meeting he talked only of himself and "what a great operator he was".

Bashir nevertheless spent weeks befriending Best's wife, Alex, while George was fighting for his life in hospital after 30 years on the bottle. Later he portrayed her as a callously selfish woman whose own drinking habits were likely to increase the chances of her husband's death.

Max Clifford is just one of a growing chorus of Bashir critics, who, like the New York Times, decries his "callous self-interest masked as sympathy". "Martin Bashir is interested in Martin Bashir first and second. Nothing else comes into it," Clifford claims. Until now, he adds, celebrities have been falling over themselves to be interviewed by Bashir, as they have felt that by doing so they were "putting themselves on the same level as Diana". Now Bashir will for ever be associated with the unmasking of Wacko Jacko – a TV coup no doubt, but one that no self-respecting celebrity will surely want to risk repeating.