Princess Diana Revealed a Painful ‘Regret’ About William and Harry Days Before Her Death
Her last holiday brought a rare admission about the impact of the Panorama interview on her boys.
Ten days before her life was cut short in Paris, Princess Diana shared something she rarely admitted aloud. Diana confided about a regret that stayed with her, one tied directly to the two people she fought hardest to protect. She was not worried about the chaos around her, or the institution she had shaken; instead, it was about Prince William and Prince Harry, and a feeling she feared she could not undo.
In August 1997, Diana joined her close friend Rosa Monckton for a summer break in Greece, which turned out to be her last. At some point, their conversations circled back to the 1995 Panorama interview, the explosive broadcast that had followed her everywhere for nearly two years. Monckton in her interview with PEOPLE! recalled Diana lowering her guard long enough to say something she had not admitted publicly, “She told me she regretted doing it because of the harm she thought it had done to her boys.”
The interview, a global shockwave viewed by roughly 200 million people, had dismantled the silence around her marriage, her struggles, and the emotional turmoil she had been through. In the weeks after it aired, she was hailed, criticised, and mythologised in equal measure. But for the mother in her, the only thing that mattered was how the fallout had shaped life for William, then 15, and Harry, 12. And the regret probably was not that she had shared her side of the truth to the world out there, but in the idea that its aftershocks had reached her children before they were old enough to understand the nuance.
And the broadcast’s shadow continued following her, as time passed. The Panorama interview, already one of the most dissected programmes in modern media, was eventually reexamined in 2021 through the Dyson inquiry. That investigation concluded that journalist Martin Bashir had used deception, including forged financial documents, to secure Diana’s trust and that senior BBC executives had later tried to cover it up. It was a well-orchestrated manipulation from Bashir’s end.
Bashir had presented himself as her only safe conduit, stoking her fears with fabricated claims, including that King Charles wanted her killed and that Prince William’s watch had been turned into a surveillance tool. “She was frail, and that made her susceptible to Bashir,” Monckton said, adding that Diana "kept it all in." "He’d told her she couldn’t talk about it. She cut people out because of that," Monckton added. 
One person who wasn’t ready to let the story rest was investigative journalist Andy Webb, who spent almost two decades tracing the full chain of events. His reporting triggered coverage, legal pushes, and eventually the Dyson inquiry, though he argues the BBC’s 25-year cover-up wasn’t fully addressed. As recently as 2024, his Freedom of Information fight forced the release of thousands of internal BBC emails, many still blacked out. His new book, Dianarama: Deception, Entrapment, Cover-Up — The Betrayal of Princess Diana, pulls together everything he uncovered. “Her life became untethered,” Webb says. “It was frenzied between the interview and her death.”
