It was one of the big interviews of the last century, the “three people in this marriage” one, where the BBC’s Martin Bashir drew out from Princess Diana all of the travails and faithlessness of her marriage to Charles, the future king.

We know now that Bashir lied and fraudulently had created fake bank accounts, seemingly to prove that two people close to her were selling secrets to Rupert Murdoch’s News International, implicitly The Sun and News Of The World. He used the forgeries to dupe Diana’s younger brother Earl Spencer into arranging a meeting with her, and the subsequent TV interview.

But more than that, Spencer claims Bashir told him that she was being watched by MI6 and that there was a plot to kill her. The interview went ahead as we know. Bashir’s explanation about why he commissioned the forgeries? He didn’t know why he did it. It was “stupid”. It’s worse than that and it may well be criminal.

Tony Hall, then the BBC’s head of news and subsequently director-general, sent Bashir a note telling him: “You should be very proud of your scoop.” When doubts were raised about the methods involved he led a whitewash, what the corporation called an inquiry, which totally exonerated Bashir.

Spencer was not asked for his side of it, even although Bashir had admitted the forgeries and the brokering of the interview. Hall also misled the BBC board about the circumstances surrounding it. The corporation then, as Lord John Dyson’s report into the shoddy affair reveals, instituted a cover-up.

In any other news organisation, in any reputable business, when the circumstances of the fraudulent deception were clear, Bashir would have been given 10 minutes to clear his desk and leave the building. I worked for the BBC when Alasdair Milne was director-general and if he had been in charge he’d have helped him pack and huckled him out.

Bashir resigned from the Beeb days before the report came out, the conclusions of which would have been given to him in advance.

Here’s the rich bit. Since leaving the Beeb, Hall has become the chair of a start-up documentary company called HTYT Stories – one of the two directors of which is Godric Smith, a former spokesman for Tony Blair. What an ensemble.

Hall is also a life peer – Baron Hall of Birkenhead – sitting in the House of Lords as a legislator. This is a man, demonstrably in my view, totally unfit to have a seat on the red benches of the most lavishly-decorated room in the Palace of Westminster, to wear the ermine robes or to cast a vote in the governing process.

I’m currently setting up a petition to have him stripped of the peerage. If it reaches 100,000 signatures it will be debated in the Parliament. Details next week.

Appy days

THE Happiness Project. It sounds like a Hollywood movie, or something vaguely religious involving incantations and possibly trepanning, but it’s actually a smartphone app which aims to do what it says on the screen. It has been developed by neuroscientists at the University College London with funding from the Medical Research Council and other mental health bodies.

There are four games focusing on something scientists feel is important for happiness: uncertainty, thinking about the future, learning, and effort. There are spinning circles, animals and fish with the games asking you for your happiness reaction. It seems a bit simplistic, but then I’m not a neuroscientist

Apparently there’s something called the “hedonic treadmill” which is when you don’t feel lasting happiness about something good that has happened to you. Perhaps we’re supposed to feel bad or guilty about this. All I can say is that when I started the games I was in a mellow mood and when I gave up I was angry about the futility of it. That can’t be a reaction they were looking for?

Out of border

LAST month, a Belgian farmer was ploughing a field when he noticed a large stone in his way. So he did what farmers do and threw it out of the way – about seven feet away – thus redrawing the border between Belgium and France, making his country larger and France smaller. It was a border stone which had been in place since 1819 until the angry farmer expanded his country.

This, of course, has ramifications for Scottish independence seekers. Those idiots from Scottish Resistance, three men and a mangy cur, could, night after night, move that border sign with England just a few metres north and no-one would notice. After a month or two the unionist-voting Borders would be in England and independence would be a shoo-in.

A beautiful mind

SHE was a bit before my time but Hedy Lamarr was a woman ahead of her own time. She was an Austrian-born, American actress billed by MGM as the most beautiful woman in the world. But she was a lot more than that.

At the age of 18 the then-Hedy Kiesler took the leading role in what was a highly-controversial film that would be banned in a number of countries including the US. It was a Czech-made movie called Ecstasy, and in it she played the neglected wife of an uncaring older man. What was shocking at the time was that it contained the first scene of an actress, her, having an orgasm. In fact, someone stuck her with a pin, which is a bedroom technique I don’t think would work today.

She married young – well, she married six times and had many flings, including with Howard Hughes. But her first husband, a weapons manufacturer who supplied Mussolini, was domineering, forbidding her to act, so she fled – first to Paris and then London where Louis B Mayer, head of MGM, spotted her and signed her up.

The important work in her life was as an inventor, principally during the Second World War, when the US had still to enter the war and Britain stood alone. She said of it: “British fliers were over hostile territory as soon as they crossed the channel, but German aviators were over friendly territory most of the way to England ... I got the idea for my invention when I tried to think of some way to even the balance for the British. A radio-controlled torpedo, I thought, would do it.’”

Together with her friend, the composer and pianist George Antheil, they invented a frequency-hopping device which could not be jammed, as signals could be then. They patented it and took it to the US Navy, who thought it was “red hot”, but because it came from outside the military and, probably, from a woman, they didn’t implement it until 1957.

Today, the techniques she invented, called spread spectrum, are used in Bluetooth and wi-fi. Next time I use my mobile I’ll be thinking of a truly remarkable woman.