Royal Affair Rumors Resurface

But it wasn’t for lack of trying on Juan Carlos’ part.

“I felt uncomfortable being left alone with him in a room, although I can assure you nothing happened,” Diana allegedly told friends of the royal after one such trip, referring to Juan Carlos as “a very libidinous man.”

Prince George Has the Sweetest Reaction When He Sees His Grandmother Princess Diana’s Signature at Poignant Visit

Prince William took his eldest son to visit The Passage for the first time almost 32 years to the day after his mother took him in 1993.

The visit itself actually happened a few days earlier on December 16, and while there, the 12-year-old future king took a moment to sign the organization’s guestbook, which had previously been signed by both Diana and William on a visit mother and son had made there together on December 14, 1993—almost 32 years to the day earlier. As George saw the distinctive signature of his late grandmother—who died at just 36 years old in an August 31, 1997 car crash in Paris—he was reportedly “fascinated” by the moment, being heard to say “Wow, okay,” when seeing Diana’s signature (per The Daily Mail).

Mick Clarke, chief executive of The Passage, described the father and son visit as “a proud dad moment” for William and a chance to tell George, “That’s my mum.” William, for his part, introduced George to Clarke by saying to his son, “This is the guy I was telling you about.”

William made his first visit to The Passage when he was 11 years old; at 12, George’s first visit happened at nearly the same age. George has had a number of firsts this year—a meaningful tea party appearance with his parents the Prince and Princess of Wales at Buckingham Palace back in May in honor of VE Day, and in November, George accompanied his mom Kate Middleton to a Remembrance event, standing in for William as the Prince of Wales traveled back to the U.K. from Brazil. The Passage visit is also loaded with meaning, and while there the two future kings helped prepare Christmas lunches for the homeless, which Clarke told George, “is a really important day, because it’s for people who perhaps won’t have a place that they can call home this Christmas.”

“I said, ‘We’ve just got a number of different things for you to help us with, so time to roll your sleeves up and get stuck in,’” Clarke said. “He was well up for it. Absolutely. Very much like his dad in terms of he just wanted to crack on, which was lovely.”

Of the sentimental moment where George signed the guestbook, Clarke said, “We looked before and the page that I had from William’s very first visit with his mum. As you’ll see in the photo, it has Diana 1993, William 1993. And there was a gap, you know, kind of underneath it. And so we’d asked William, ‘Do you think George would like to sign this?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, that would be great.’ So that was really lovely because it was also a lovely moment where William was able to say to George, ‘That’s my mum. And this was the very first day that she took me to The Passage.’ And it was a lovely moment in terms of almost coming full circle from 1993 to the end of 2025.”

William and George visited for “around an hour” before leaving to join the rest of the royal family for King Charles’s Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace.

“One of the nice things is it’s very much like any family, really, in terms of it had to be the right time and feel right for them and, most importantly I think, feel right for George,” Clarke said of the preteen’s first visit. “So, you know, we talked over the last couple of years really in terms of that, you know, that’d be great to do.”

When William became royal patron of The Passage in 2019, he said, “The visits I made as a child to this place left a deep and lasting impression upon me.” In his 2024 documentary Prince William: We Can End Homelessness, he added, “I’d never been to anything like that before. And I was a bit anxious as to what to expect.”

“My mother went about her usual part of making everyone feel relaxed and having a laugh and joking with everyone,” he continued. “I remember at the time kind of thinking, ‘Well, if everyone’s not got a home, they’re all going to be really sad.’ But it was incredible how happy an environment it was.”

William has opened up numerous times about how he tells his three children about his mother, and told British GQ in May 2017—just ahead of the 20-year anniversary of her death—how heartbreaking it was that she never got to meet his wife and kids. “I would like to have had her advice,” he said. “I would love her to have met Catherine and to have seen the children grow up. It makes me sad that she won’t, that they will never know her.”

NEED TO KNOW

• New reporting exposes the elaborate scheme Martin Bashir used to win Princess Diana’s trust — and how BBC leaders helped cover it up
• In his new book Dianarama, investigative journalist Andy Webb reveals the full scope of the manipulation, telling PEOPLE Diana’s life “became untethered” after her 1995 Panorama interview
• Diana’s brother Charles Spencer tells PEOPLE that BBC “deception” left his sister “vulnerable in Paris the night she died.”

Before the cameras captured the line that would echo through history, “There were three of us in this marriage,” Princess Diana stood in her private sitting room at Kensington Palace on Nov. 5, 1995, watching three men she had quietly ushered inside unpack camera equipment smuggled in cardboard boxes. She had sent her staff home. No makeup artist, no stylist, no standard TV crew. This interview, for the BBC investigative program Panorama, had to be in secret. The stakes, she believed, were that high — this was her chance to reclaim her voice and tell her story on her own terms.

Decades later it became clear that the interview was the product of an extraordinary deception. A 2021 independent inquiry led by U.K. senior judge Lord Dyson found that journalist Martin Bashir had used forged documents to manipulate Diana — a scheme BBC executives later tried to conceal. Prince William would go on to blame the interview for fueling his mother’s “fear, paranoia and isolation” and worsening her strained relationship with Prince Charles.

Investigative journalist Andy Webb has spent nearly 20 years unearthing the full truth — first sparking media coverage and ultimately prompting the Dyson inquiry, which he says overlooked the BBC’s 25-year cover-up. As recently as 2024, his Freedom of Information battle forced the release of thousands of additional BBC emails, though many remain heavily redacted.

Webb’s new book Dianarama: Deception, Entrapment, Cover-Up—The Betrayal of Princess Diana (out Nov. 25) lays bare for the first time the full scope of Bashir’s manipulation: luring Diana’s brother Charles ­Spencer — himself a victim of Bashir’s tactics — to gain access to the princess, presenting forged bank statements suggesting palace staff were spying on her and spreading false claims that Prince Charles wanted to have her killed and William’s watch was a spying device.

“Her life became untethered,” Webb tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story. “It was frenzied between the interview and her death. There’s so much that’s new that I wanted to put down in this book — a first draft of history.”

Diana had reason to trust Bashir — he worked for one of the world’s most respected news organizations. Already wary of palace officials and shaken by breaches of her privacy — including “Squidgygate,” a secretly recorded phone call that went public in 1992—she felt watched and increasingly isolated.

Her former private secretary, Patrick Jephson, tells PEOPLE that “Bashir picked a very opportune moment” to show the faked bank statements to Spencer and convince him that people in Diana’s orbit — including Jephson and a senior aide to Prince Charles — were accepting money to spy on her.

“She was in a state of justified anxiety,” says Jephson. “It is not paranoia if you have reasonable grounds to believe that they are out to get you.”

Adds close friend Rosa Monckton: “She was frail, and that made her susceptible.”

After Spencer, 61, arranged a meeting with Diana, Webb alleges, Bashir falsely told her that her sons’ nanny Tiggy Legge‑Bourke was having an affair with Charles, producing a forged document suggesting she had undergone an abortion paid for by the prince. Those claims were said to be the final catalyst that drove Diana to the interview.

By the time the interview arrived, just weeks after that first meeting, Bashir’s influence was firmly in place. Diana insisted on a stripped-down crew — Bashir, a producer and a cameraman — who slipped into the palace under the cover story of demonstrating a sound system.

Webb describes Diana and Bashir spending 90 minutes in the kitchen, reviewing the questions and rehearsing for what would become one of the most consequential broadcasts in royal history. When the interview aired on Nov. 20, 1995, it delivered bombshell after bombshell: Diana spoke openly about Charles’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles and her struggle with bulimia and confirmed her own affair with James Hewitt.

“It was a performance. The smoothness, the facility, the fluidity — at no point did Diana appear flustered,” Webb says.

The now-iconic image of her eyeliner-rimmed stare drew an estimated 200 million global viewers, none aware of the lies behind it.

The fallout was immediate. Within a month Queen Elizabeth ordered Charles and Diana to proceed with a divorce. Jephson resigned in January 1996, unaware of why the princess had turned sharply against him.

“It is chilling to rerun those events,” Jephson tells PEOPLE, “and feel that Diana was seeing me as the enemy within.”

Meanwhile, BBC executives knew something was wrong. In late 1995 a graphic designer told higher-ups that the bank statements were fake. When challenged, Bashir admitted to forgery but lied to managers, insisting he hadn’t shown them to anyone. Only when it became impossible to hide did he confess to showing the forgeries to Spencer. Instead of confronting the implications, the BBC launched a 1996 internal review, later condemned as “woefully ineffective.” It accepted Bashir’s shifting explanations, cleared him of wrongdoing and buried facts that wouldn’t emerge for decades.

“BBC bosses knew enough to warn Diana that she had been dealing with a fraudster,” says Webb.

“Her life would have followed a different path if she’d been warned,” Webb continues. “She might plausibly still be alive today — a grandmother at 64, enjoying her five grandchildren. The consequences were lethal.”

For their part, the outlet tells PEOPLE, “The BBC appointed Lord Dyson to investigate how Martin Bashir obtained the 1995 Panorama interview with Diana, Princess of Wales. The Dyson Report was published in 2021, the BBC accepted its findings in full and publicly apologized for its part in the report’s conclusions.”

It’s not enough for her brother. “High-ranking people in the BBC participated in securing this interview through appalling deception,” Spencer, who has supported Webb’s investigation, tells PEOPLE. “I am sure that this led directly to Diana being left vulnerable in Paris on the night she died.”

By the time of that final trip in August 1997, Diana had lost the guidance of her loyal aide. Distrusting palace officials, she had long declined official protection and relied instead on the security provided by then boyfriend Dodi Fayed’s team — a set-up that proved fatally insufficient. Without adequate counsel and protection, Diana was vulnerable in Paris, where she died at 36 in a high-speed crash caused by her driver’s intoxication and reckless driving, amid a chase by paparazzi.

“Because Diana had been tricked into distrusting every kind of official protection,” says Jephson, “she put herself in a position where she had to accept the protection of people who were not competent.”

Her sons feel the weight of that consequence, too. In 2021, Prince Harry, 41, stated, “Our mother lost her life because of this.”

Prince William, 43, who Webb says has a copy of his book, echoed that anguish: “What saddens me most is that if the BBC had properly investigated the complaints and concerns first raised in 1995, my mother would have known that she had been deceived. She was failed not just by a rogue reporter but by leaders at the BBC who looked the other way rather than asking the tough questions. These failings . . . not only let my mother down and my family down; they let the public down too.”

The fight for the truth is ongoing. Webb points out the irony that the BBC operates under a royal charter while the future King’s trust in the broadcaster remains in question.

“William wants transparency, honesty and full disclosure,” he says.

Diana never learned the truth. She died unaware of Bashir’s lies and manipulations.

“She firmly believes that he was a truth teller, Webb continues. “Had Diana realized Bashir was a fraudster, everything would have fallen away.”