In fact it’s arguable that his fundraising drives led more or less naturally to a career in politics without his even consciously knowing it at the time. Imran had also liked a good scrap as a cricketer, and often looked back fondly on the various wars-by-proxy in which he’d risen to fame. There may never have been a more aggressively patriotic player. The eventual outcome was a ‘chronological, logical evolution’, Omar Kureishi believed. Imran’s hospital activities ‘showed much the same mixture of idealism, hard-headed economics and controlled polemics [which] would be his stocks-in-trade in the years ahead’. To these earlier themes he soon added a vocal concern about the ruling elites in Pakistan, where ‘kickbacks, commissions and outright robbery’ were rife. Many of the country’s senior military officers, in particular, came to realise the advantages of an entrepreneurial approach to their jobs. In just one example of the many available, an Admiral Mansur ul Haq, the head of the navy from 1994 to 1996, left his post in some haste for the United States, from where the Pakistani government eventually extradited him to face charges of ‘gross, wholesale [and] systematic corruption, betrayal, dereliction and grand larceny’. The National Accountability Bureau in Islamabad struck a deal with ul Haq in which, without admitting any wrongdoing, he returned some US$8 million to the state. Imran was not alone in pointing out that this voluntary payment amounted to the equivalent of 1,300 years of the Admiral’s salary.
Despite a number of semi-official overtures, Imran resisted the temptation to make a professional cricket comeback. After March 1992 he restricted himself to a few charity matches on behalf of the hospital, and seems to have been sublimely indifferent to the various third-party books, videos and other spin-offs brought out to celebrate his career. The gossip columns, that daily substitute for immortality, now saw a bit less of him than before. He did try his hand at television commentary and occasional interviewing, and soon regretted it. Imran ‘literally sweated [his] way through’ one live encounter with Jeffrey Archer, who confirmed to me that this had not been a success. ‘Imran wasn’t a natural on air, because strangely for someone who want[ed] to enter the bear-pit of politics, he’s not an extrovert, and if anything rather shy. Frankly, I think his talents would have been wasted on TV.’ Another well-placed source added that, in his opinion, Imran’s essential problem as an interviewer was that ‘he liked to transmit and not to receive’.
For all that, believing ‘there [was] enough stuff out there already’, Imran apparently never contemplated writing anything further about himself. He did, however, continue to contribute a series of richly opinionated articles to the Daily Telegraph and other British outlets. The fussily handwritten copy was always punctually delivered, and not burdened by any undue sense of deference to the host nation. Sunil Gavaskar once advised Imran to tone down his printed remarks, lest the Telegraph see fit to cancel the arrangement. One former sports editor recalled that he had once gently suggested that his guest columnist ‘revisit’ a piece in which he had expressed various reservations about the English county cricket system. Although he had made some ‘extremely sound’ points, ‘it seem[ed] just a bit too partisan to win over any hearts and minds’. Rather than lengthening the article, as had been proposed, Imran decided to make it even shorter, rightly describing it as ‘hard-hitting’. Like most of his journalism, it was good stuff, with just that touch of the haphazard which raised it above the level of a full-on rant. The supposedly old-school figure of Colin Cowdrey was just one of those who approved; he considered ‘Khan’s pieces always intelligent [and] occasionally touching on genius’. By the mid 1990s, Imran’s writing was his biggest regular source of income. His few investments, including that in a Lahore supermarket, were thought to have been motivated less by the desire for personal reward than by the opportunity they offered to further provide for his hospital.
The interplay between the Eastern and Western versions of Imran continued to give rise to some good-natured comment about the man the press called, tritely, perhaps, the ‘playboy saint’. It’s arguable that the struggle to resolve the balance to his own satisfaction had been going on in one form or another ever since he arrived in England in 1971. Imran made no pretence about the fact that he enjoyed aspects of the good life, or at least the opportunity it afforded him to mingle on equal terms with those not normally within the orbit of an Asian-born cricketer. The Marchioness of Worcester remained a close friend. She named a horse after him. He saw something of Mick Jagger and his ilk. The cricket-loving (and Oscar-winning) songwriter Tim Rice remembers an incident from the mid-1990s ‘when a near-namesake, and a pal of mine, Tim Wright, took Imran up on a rather vague “we must have lunch sometime” offer. When Wright duly met the great man in the restaurant he discovered that he had thought he was meeting me. A strained meal followed.’
Imran was aware of the fact that mutterings about his social life were ‘but part of a larger attack’ once again under way by enemies within the Pakistani press. The Karachi-based Newsline, for example, would imply that ‘the former speedster’ was also something of a religious zealot ‘with more than a soft corner for the Afghan Taliban [something Imran denies] … Khan’s “self-righteousness and highflying principles fail to explain the link between his strange fondness for the [clerics] and his passion for all the good things in life which have come from the west”,’ the paper added, quoting an anonymous source. Two other authors, James Forsyth and Jai Singh, were principally concerned with mustering evidence to portray Imran as a chronic amnesiac when it came to overlooking various ‘troubling’ aspects of his past life, and deployed some possibly selective facts of their own regarding his ‘demagoguery’ and ‘two-facedness’. The general thrust was that Imran was an irresponsible, serial shagger. In time they even called attention to the fact that he had formed a close relationship with a woman who was ‘half Jewish’. Imran himself remarked only that he had been ‘brought up in a predominantly female household’ and as a result ‘like[d] women very much. I find it hard to understand why the English exclude girls from certain places. I’ve never grasped Women’s Lib and the idea of the sexes competing. I think of them as complementing each other … Pakistanis are much warmer towards their women than the English. They offer them respect and protection.’
Some of Imran’s apparent contradictions on the subject were on hand when he joined a three-day shooting party arranged by his friend Syra Vahidy and her husband early in 1994. ‘We were up in rural Pakistan,’ says Vahidy, an eminently fair-minded person with no axe to grind. ‘And here was Imran, in native costume, accompanied by this German girl [Kristiane Backer]. It was all slightly odd. For the first time since I’d known him he seemed to be profoundly interested in religion and in his roots as a whole. He talked a lot about rediscovering himself. “For too long I was ignorant of my traditions,” he said. Imran also took the opportunity to instruct [Backer] on the correct Islamic protocol for a woman, for example that she should always cover her head. In fact he was rather insistent about it. From my experience, he was a completely changed man [in] that he talked not about cricket but about the Almighty’s infinite understanding and forgiveness. It was obviously heartfelt stuff, and it was quite a revelation to me. Imran seemed almost to have reinvented himself as a man of God. Of course, he and his girlfriend still slept together at night.’
The way in which ‘Imran’ and ‘ball-tampering’ came to be associated in some people’s minds was innocuous enough in its particulars, even if the result was long-running and ultimately sensational. It began when the author Ivo Tennant, a well-respected sports correspondent for The Times and other publications, quoted Imran in a biography as saying, ‘I have occasionally scratched the side and lifted the seam.’ Tennant went on to describe a fixture in 1981 when, as we’ve seen, his subject had applied a bottle top to the ball, which had subsequently ‘started to move around a lot’. As generally happens in the cricket publishing world, the book was launched to minimal fanfare and duly enjoyed a small but respectable sale. Imran’s admissio
n concerned a now largely forgotten county match 13 years in the past, and amounted to three brief sentences out of a 70,000-word text. I happened to be working for the same publisher at the time, and can confirm that there was no great sense of any dramatic scandal being abroad. It was a perfectly well written book of the sort (and I speak with well-earned humility on the subject) that tends to get politely noticed in the trade before going on to a long and peaceful retirement in the discount bins.
All that changed when, after some early, lesser news comment, an enterprising features editor at the Mail on Sunday splashed Imran’s ‘shocking’ mea culpa across his paper’s front page. According to the publisher’s estimate, some six million people would come to read about the 1981 incident over the course of the next 24 hours, which was approximately 5,997,000 more than had initially bought Tennant’s book. Reactions to the story were mixed. ‘I was deeply disappointed,’ a then member of the Pakistani cabinet recalls. ‘To say that it all happened a long time ago wasn’t enough. Our nation’s most illustrious sportsman was guilty of sharp practice. These are the hard facts. They cannot be diluted by the passage of time.’ To Imran himself, who resigned his position at the ICC, there seemed to be a double standard at play. Seam-doctoring, he said, was ‘as old as the game itself’. Over the years, he had seen ‘almost all the great bowlers’ do it, ‘and very few of them were ever called a cheat’. In an interview published with the Sun he went on to imply that ‘the biggest names in English cricket’, not excluding the late Jim Laker, had been occasional tamperers. In 2008, Imran added, ‘All I did was give one instance where I used an object.’ In an ideal world, the disclosure should have been the starting-point for a long overdue debate on ‘what was and wasn’t acceptable practice’, and was thus intended more in the way of a public service than as a tabloid headline.
As soon as the press got wind of the story an avalanche of criticism descended. Some of it was of the usual sort that tended to surround Pakistani cricket. Imran’s remarks came less than two years since the heated 1992 series in England, when Ian Botham recalls of a break during a one-day international at Lord’s (in which Imran himself wasn’t playing), ‘The umpires took one look at the ball and in no time at all came to the conclusion that it had been tampered with.’ Although, as Botham adds, ‘we were told not to discuss with anybody what had gone on’, the story had promptly become both a front- and back-page lead, and added significantly to the view that ‘the Pakis had been at it [ball doctoring] for 30 years’, as one distinguished former England batsman said in 2009.
Some of the turmoil also arose because of a particular desire to get at Imran. Chris Lander believed it was a ‘classic case of “We build ‘em up and we chop ‘em down”’, or the so-called tall-poppy syndrome. One prominent English sports commentator, speaking to me, perhaps wisely, on condition of anonymity, remarked of the subject of this book, ‘Even by today’s celebrity standards he was a quite magnificently self-important fellow for someone who happened to be quite good with a bat and ball … [Imran] reeked of condescension … You always felt you should back out of his presence as though taking your leave of royalty.’ Under the circumstances, a degree of schadenfreude at Imran’s expense was a fair bet among certain journalists.
Another possibility was that at least some of the criticism came from the fact that, over the last 15 years or so, ‘our chubby little chaps had had the gall to pull the lion’s tail, [which] had stirred up a hornet’s nest of resentment against them’, in General Zia’s slightly mixed 1987 metaphor. Imran himself seemed to interpret events in this light when he later remarked to India Today, ‘There is a lot of racism in [Western] society. Where is this hatred coming from?’ It was a fair question, but it still seems a stretch to portray the British media of 1994, as at least one prominent Imran supporter does, as ‘irredeemably and institutionally racist’. As in most other areas, the scrupulously open-minded majority coexisted with the perhaps less enlightened fringe still fond of ‘Paki’ jokes that stereotyped the subcontinentals as swarthy and devious, although occasionally having a good sense of rhythm. It’s conceivable that Imran came in for the pounding he did for a variety of reasons, some of them obscurely related to his skin colour. At least on occasion, he seems to have favoured this particular explanation of events. One of Imran’s hospital associates, who saw him almost daily in the mid-1990s, thought ‘he probably had a much sharper outlook on these things after he left cricket and got out in normal society for a change … He became a lot more aware of what you call civil rights. So yes, it’s possible he saw some of the attacks on him and on other Pakistanis as racially motivated.’
Some time after Ivo Tennant’s book was published, an unknown party drew Mike Gatting’s attention to an unflattering reference in it to himself. The passage in question seemed to imply that Imran had called the former England captain uneducated, an obvious slur both on Gatting and the John Kelly Boys’ Technology College of north London. It was a spurious and, perhaps worse, legally reprehensible thing to have said. In time Gatting sued both Tennant and the book’s publishers (but not Imran) and won substantial damages. The general feeling was that both the offence and its outcome did little to help an already strained Anglo-Pakistani sporting relationship.
Two factors emerged out of the Tennant affair, which became something of a cause célbre in the book publishing world of 1994. The first was the obviously quite acute sensitivity of various parties to the ball-tampering issue, and its ‘racist’ subtext. This particular grenade had already once been lobbed in the direction of the British courts, when Sarfraz Nawaz sued Allan Lamb over his claims that Sarfraz had shown him the different methods for lifting the seam while they were teammates at Northamptonshire; the case was eventually dropped. The second was the potentially equally charged matter of an Englishman’s schooling and, by extension, of his perceived slot in the social order. Two years after Tennant’s book was published, both factors combined in one of the more spectacular celebrity feuds of recent times.
In early November 1994, Imran set off on a countrywide tour of Pakistan to raise the final tranche of money for his hospital before it opened its doors. For the next 45 days he travelled the towns and villages, 29 in all, in a sort of Popemobile, alighting to give upwards of a hundred speeches. Imran’s basic message combined the key financial appeal with what the Sunday Times called ‘rousing, quasi-religious sermons attacking feminism, atheists, politicians, “evil” Western values and the “brown sahibs” or those Pakistani elites who aped their former colonial masters’.
Vastly helpful in the whole process was a sort of call-and-response litany that developed between Imran and his audiences. It had started early on in the tour, in a dusty Punjab market square, when some man with a big voice had shouted from the crowd, ‘Give them the long handle, Imran’, apparently a reference to knocking the established politicians for six. A loud roar had gone up. As soon as he could be heard, Imran shouted back some such remark as ‘I’m going to’ or ‘Let’s do it together’. Various other repartee of a cricketing nature followed throughout the remainder of the tour. Such exchanges brought delirium, after which Imran could say more or less anything he chose and still be sure of a warm, materially gratifying response. When all the figures were added up, he had collected the equivalent of £2.5 million, most of it donated in small notes or coins.
One British Sunday newspaper stringer followed Imran on the fundraising trail and thought he resembled another ‘aloof but oddly charismatic’ figure: the Prince of Wales. ‘Both men suffer from arrested development. They have the same sense of destiny and the same identification with the man in the street (whom Imran calls “the masses”).’ A certain ‘humourlessness’ and ‘addiction to worthy causes’ were also qualities they apparently shared. In fact, their core appeal was ‘almost identical’, although the heir to the throne might perhaps have struggled to demonstrate the correct grip for an in-ducker, as Imran did when a child once marched gravely out of the crowd to present him with an
orange for the purpose.
At Lahore, the next stop, there was a predictably large and respectful audience on hand. Wearing a baggy-fitting kurta hizar and comfortable white trainers, Imran spoke slowly for the first few minutes, seeming to choose his words carefully. He was there not only to raise money, he said, but to share certain concerns about the state of the world with his fellow citizens. Then, as it appeared to one English observer, a cricket fan and doctor named Chris Leahy, he switched to schoolmaster mode: ‘There was a slightly exasperated tone to be heard as he ticked off one looming spiritual crisis after another.’ But Imran was lecturing a class that was ‘quite obviously thrilled and proud to be there … At the end there was a tumultous ovation. He was almost like a messiah to them.’ Touring the outlying villages, Imran stood up the whole way in his automobile, clearly enjoying the scene as much as the crowds did.
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