Princess Diana’s biographer has accused former BBC reporter Martin Bashir of scaring the princess “half to death” in order to land his interview.

Andrew Morton, who wrote the 1993 book, Diana: Her True Story, denied suggestions that her involvement in the Panorama programme had been “self-indulgent”, insisting it was more about “self-preservation”.

The former tabloid journalist, who gained unprecedented access to Diana when he was writing his biography, said Mr Bashir had left her in a state of “fear and trepidation”.

Asked if he would have landed the 1995 scoop had it not been for his duplicity, Mr Morton told Sky’s Trevor Phillips on Sunday programme: “He wouldn’t have got it, he scared her half to death.”

Mr Morton went on: “He had her thinking he had contacts inside MI5, he arranged meetings in underground car parks – scary places at the best of times, but when you think your life was in danger it was very potent.”

But Mr Morton conceded Diana was keen to do a television interview and would have given it to another journalist eventually.

“There was no question at all Diana was going to speak her mind,” he said. “An awful lot of what she did say had been circulating before that, but because it came out of her mouth it seemed sensational, raw and new.”

Mr Morton said Mr Bashir had “beaten the pack” by lying to Diana, adding that Oprah Winfrey, who recently conducted the interview with Prince Harry and Meghan, was among the journalists in the “mile long queue outside Kensington Palace”. (© Telegraph Media Group Ltd 2021)