On 29 December 1994, the Shaukat Khanum hospital opened to the public. Standing at a podium between assorted political dignitaries on one side and Imran on the other, a young cancer patient named Sumera Yousaf did the honours. The hospital’s services gradually came on line, as scheduled, over the next six months — first the walk-in clinics and pharmacy, followed by the operating rooms, and the remaining outpatient facilities. Even now, the Karachi-based press criticism didn’t let up: year after year Imran would open the papers only to see carping editorials about his alleged favouritism towards his home town. The hostility often spilled over from leader pages into news columns: favourable stories, like the opening ceremony, were banished to inside pages, while unfavourable ones, often concerning some minor construction delay, were highlighted on the front page, right-hand column, where thinly veiled, necessarily anonymous allegations of bribery and corruption also did the rounds. The fact is that the ordinary Pakistani citizen of limited means now had access to the sort of critical healthcare treatment previously reserved for what The Times called a ‘tiny minority composed of the country’s military and civilian rulers, or those who had used their influence for personal gain’, in so far as there was a distinction between the two. Behind the media venom, it was clear that Imran had accomplished something of longer-term national consequence than even winning the World Cup.
Nor was the whole project brought off in a vacuum. At some stage during his 1994 fundraising tour, Imran became persuaded of the merits of a populist political ideology that came to dominate his life from then on. ‘Travelling around like that changed me,’ he remarked. ‘The most interesting thing was that the really rich people, of the sort I’d been to school with, hardly contributed anything, while thousands of others were lining up to drop a few rupees each into the collecting box. It was my first real contact with the grass-roots, and it came as something of a shock. Essentially, what Pakistan had was a tiny ruling elite sponging off the majority of the citizens, who had nothing.’ The ‘fun-loving Romeo’ regularly taken to task in the Weekly Standard and elsewhere was now replaced by the intense, almost fanatical social reformer who would make it his life’s mission to campaign to ‘reverse the standard government policy of protecting only the top one or two per cent of society and exploiting the rest’.
As transformations go, Imran’s wasn’t, perhaps, in the Damascene calibre. Despite some churlish press comment, he hadn’t exactly been living a life of unremitting frivolity and decadence up until then. His work at UNICEF had been going on for nearly a decade. But it does seem fair to say that there was a marked shift in Imran’s priorities, and that this occurred fairly soon after he returned to Lahore from the provinces. A hospital associate with whom Imran worked particularly closely watched with interest as his longtime friend became completely absorbed by the ‘sort of radical agenda he’d somehow avoided for 42 years’. The same source adds that he never doubted his colleague’s sincerity, although he noted an early ‘lack of information’. Imran’s basic innocence of organised politics made him a natural prey for yet more ‘vicious [and] sustained’ attacks in the media. In time he took even more flak as a social campaigner than he had as a cricketer. The overall thesis was that Imran was a dilettante whose only experience of foreign affairs, to quote the Herald, ‘had been of the kind he conducted in various bedrooms in London or Sydney’. The odds were ‘strongly against a sportsman ever successfully becoming a statesman’, according to the Sunday Times. ‘Khan, however,’ the paper allowed, ‘has long since shown his capacity for uncritical self-belief and an ability to ignore the factional yappings’ that invariably greeted a public figure in Pakistan.
Even Imran’s detractors agreed that the nation wasn’t particularly well served at that time by self-denying, visionary political leaders. Much of what Nawaz Sharif had taught the country to regard as ‘prosperity’ was, in fact, nothing more than a debt-fuelled illusion. As in so many other policy areas Sharif’s rhetoric was impressive, but there was little indication of any strategy for long-term economic growth beyond continued massive borrowing from the Americans, and the associated perks it brought for a privileged few. In 1994, the Pakistani military’s net worth was estimated at £12 billion, some five times the total foreign direct investment generated by the Islamabad government. The army owned 15 per cent of the country’s land, two-thirds of it concentrated in the hands of the 80 most senior major-generals and generals. Sharif himself seems not to have been personally inconvenienced by the austerity measures he periodically visited on the Pakistani people. While in office, it was revealed that the premier owned a row of luxury flats on London’s Park Lane, among other legitimate assets controlled by a company headquartered in the British Virgin Islands.
National elections held after the political crisis of mid-1993 returned Benazir Bhutto (whose own accommodations ran to an ancestral home, complete with private zoo) to power. Bhutto’s efforts to modernise Pakistan came, in turn, to be tempered by certain allegations of personal improbity levelled against her and members of her immediate family. According to published reports, the new prime minister smuggled CDs containing uranium enrichment data to North Korea on a 1993 state visit in exchange for various return considerations by Pyongyang. A subsequent New York Times report claimed to have unearthed documents relating to a network of Swiss bank accounts maintained by Bhutto and her husband Asif Ali Zardari, whom his wife went on to appoint as Pakistan’s Minister for Investments. Though never convicted of a crime, Zardari spent eight years in prison on an assortment of fraud, deception and other charges. A Swiss magistrate later indicted Pakistan’s first couple on various counts of money laundering, which involved $13 million in cash and a $200,000 diamond necklace located in a Geneva safe-deposit box. The Polish government then charged Bhutto and Zardari of having awarded themselves a 7.15 per cent sweetener, worth roughly $2 million, from the sale to Pakistan of 8,000 tractors. Authorities in France raised the possibility that the Bhuttos had taken substantial commissions in similarly arranging for Dassault Aviation to replace 12 of their country’s air force jets. A Pakistani federal investigation of 1998 concluded that Bhutto ‘was clearly responsible for loss to the exchequer [by] misuse of her office’ in the matter of the unauthorised purchase of a $2.1 million helicopter. Meanwhile, a Dubai-based bullion dealer named Abdul Razzak Yaqub acknowledged that he had enjoyed an ‘exclusive licence’ to import more than $500 million in gold into Pakistan in return for various trade concessions, although he denied published charges that he had ‘showered the PM in diamonds and other jewellery as a thank you’.
It is, perhaps, only fair to add that both Sharif and the Bhuttos consistently denied any wrongdoing and insisted that the charges against them were ‘malicious’ and ‘politically motivated’. No court ever convicted any of them of a criminal offence. But at a time when the United Nations ranked average Pakistani household income 127th out of 158 countries surveyed, and 55 per cent of her adults were functionally illiterate, it struck some as odd that the media would carry daily reports of the successive prime ministers’ offshore funds and Swiss bank accounts. For all the judicial reviews, no Pakistani politician had yet come up with a coherent, anti-corruption populist campaign theme. As Enoch Powell once observed, ‘electorates the world over like a tune they can whistle’. Appalled by what he saw around him in the mid-1990s, Imran gave Pakistan that tune. At its core it was a local variation of ‘Power to the People’.
Between the socialite and the social crusader, then, Imran defied easy categorisation. These were trying times both for the more gushing feature-page writers and, conversely, for those who were out to get him. One former cricketer rightly draws attention to the ‘regal faade’ and an obvious affinity for issuing orders, but beneath this was a surprisingly shy, bookish and now ‘totally devoted’ believer who saw himself ‘irrevocably’ at the mercy of Allah. Wasim Raja, one of Imran’s closest playing colleagues for 15 years, with whom he mildly fell out and made up again ‘almost annually’, le
ft the best description of this ‘rare bird’: he was a ‘different man at different times … I knew at least three or four Imrans’.
A good example of what Raja possibly had in mind came in the very early days of 1995. Within a month of opening his cancer hospital, Imran was reportedly enjoying an evening out with his girlfriend Kris-tiane Backer at Annabel’s nightclub in London’s Berkeley Square. Although catering to a wide clientele this was not, perhaps, the customary haunt of a born-again Muslim of increasingly radical social views. While on the premises, it’s said that Imran fell into a ‘long philosophical discussion’ on comparative religion with Lady Annabel Goldsmith, 60, after whom the club was named. Sitting beside her was her striking young daughter Jemima. Some two years earlier, Imran had met Kristiane Backer at a dinner party hosted by his then lover Susannah Constantine. The same general pattern apparently repeated itself here. According to at least one account, ‘Backer became angry with Imran for flirting with Jemima’ and ‘gave him an earful’ on their return home that night.
Jemima Marcelle Goldsmith had been born on 30 January 1974, in London, where she was brought up mainly by her mother. Between numerous overseas holidays, her home was Ormeley Lodge, a listed Georgian mansion whose grounds were adorned by life-size sculptures of rhinoceroses, gorillas and other exotic fauna, situated on the edge of Richmond Park. Jemima’s father, the Anglo-French billionaire financier Sir James Goldsmith, was a man of unorthodox family values. Known for his polyamorous romantic relationships, Goldsmith sired eight known children by four women, three of whom he married. A newspaper profile once referred to him, not wholly approvingly, as ‘the Mick Jagger of the asset-stripping world’. Goldsmith was widely credited with having coined the maxim, ‘When you marry your mistress, you create a job vacancy’, although its true provenance is disputed. In 1963, aged 30, he embarked on a 15-year affair with the former Annabel Vane Tempest-Stewart, who at the time was married to the businessman and club owner Mark Birley. The couple went on to have two illegitimate children, Jemima and her brother Zac. In 1978, Goldsmith and Lady Annabel married ‘to formalise [the] offspring … We didn’t do it as a great act of passion,’ the bride confided, ‘more to make sure that the children’s name would be Goldsmith when they went to school’. A third, child, Ben, was born in 1980. Some six months later, Goldsmith moved to New York with his new mistress Laure Boulay, Comtesse de la Meurthe, with whom he had two more children. The rest of his life was largely devoted to a sometimes overlapping enthusiasm for ecology and libertarian politics. In 1994 Goldsmith was elected to represent a French constituency as a member of the European parliament, and subsequently founded the short-lived eurosceptic Referendum Party in Britain. He died in July 1997, aged 64.
Goldsmith’s extramarital activities meant that Jemima’s was effectively a one-parent family, albeit a rather rarefied one. Like Imran, she grew up in a large, loud, mildly chaotic household, surrounded by two brothers, two half-brothers from her mother’s first marriage and a cadre of paternal half-siblings. Tall, lanky and athletic, with a mane of brown hair, she is said by those who know about such things to have shown the ‘tomboy toughness’ and ‘steely self-assurance’ that ‘came from being considered one of the guys’. Or that’s one view. Jemima also seems to have enjoyed being escorted around town by older men, at least one of whom remembers her as ‘coy’. Several newspaper reports refer to her as both ‘level-headed’ and ‘diffident’; one well-placed source insists she was ‘quite a deep-thinking and brainy girl’ who was able to cordon off satisfying her partner’s sexual appetite as a necessary part of the courtship ritual — ‘you always got the impression she’d rather be curled up with a good book’. In October 1993, Jemima enrolled to study English at the University of Bristol. Again, some disparity exists between the accounts of her time there. One fellow student describes her as of moderate intelligence with a ‘rather superficial’ approach to literature. ‘Jem thought of herself as a great reader, but in my experience it was the sort of reading that involved rather a lot of Cliffs Notes.’ They may have done the trick, because in short order she went on to become an accomplished, multi-lingual journalist. A second university acquaintance is perhaps closer to the mark when he calls Jemima ‘very practical … she didn’t occupy her mind with grand ideas or ultimate meanings. She looked after necessities.’
In early January 1995, Jemima was 20, single, rich and physically quite arresting. ‘Long-stemmed and languid’ in one profile, she was noted for her ‘photogenic hair, model-high cheekbones and a seemingly permanent, knowing half-smile … The room stopped when she walked in.’ Although less than half his age, she was neither intimidated nor awed by Imran.
In later years, even so, there would be a certain amount of sport made in both England and Pakistan of Jemima’s alleged shortcomings. Imran’s political opponents would conjure up an unflattering picture of an airhead Sloane Ranger whose only practical accomplishment in life had been learning to ride a horse. Jemima’s domestic skills were thought to be rudimentary. ‘Harrods have got these very clever little meals now that you just pop in the microwave and it’s all done for you!’ she’s said to have enthused to a friend when she was about 17 or 18. Prior to going up to university, Jemima’s scholastic record was modest: as a teenager at London’s independent Francis Holland school for girls (alma mater to Joan and Jackie Collins) she was more obviously excited by showjumping than academics. A 1995 Sunday newspaper profile, employed to this day by journalists and biographers, described Jemima as a ‘total princess’, cutting a swathe through the drawing-rooms of Mayfair and Chelsea in a slinky Hervé Léger dress and black silk high-heeled Christian Louboutin shoes. Two or three years later, the pictures of her traipsing around Lahore with her immaculately made-up eyes peering out from under a native headdress would be the focus of much satirical commentary.
On the other hand, Jemima had at least the functional competence of the experienced socialite. She was ‘extremely gracious’ and ‘spoke just as politely to a shop assistant as she did to Princess Margaret’, I was told. She was also ‘charmingly self-effacing’ and ‘completely without side’. By all accounts, Imran found himself entranced by Jemima’s spirited liveliness and her humour; nor would he have failed to note her being a handsome woman. They already had several friends in common. Although Imran was Muslim and Jemima was part-Jewish, they shared a noblesse oblige code of behaviour derived from tradition and a strong sense of honour.
I was at boarding school with two of Jemima’s half brothers, Rupert and Robin Birley, and don’t remember them as being given over to a life of aristocratic languor. It’s true that they made a certain splash on days out when a Mercedes sometimes came to pick them up, with Blitz, the family’s Rhodesian Ridgeback, seated up front next to the chauffeur. For all that, both brothers were intelligent and unassuming and duly went on to productive careers. In 1970, on a visit to a private zoo, the 12-year-old Robin was severely mauled by a tiger and left permanently disfigured. Sixteen years later, Rupert, then 30, ventured out into the waters off Togo, West Africa, and was never seen again. The stories are worth mentioning if only to refute the theory of the Karachi Facts, and others, that Jemima lived in a ‘completely pampered world [where] unpleasant things just didn’t happen’.
The relationship with Imran moved rapidly, causing some amused talk among their friends. The press started writing about the affair around Easter of 1995, and it would be fair to say that they, too, were broadly sceptical about the couple’s long-term prospects. The Times wrote that Jemima was ‘a celebrity who was known for her wellknownness’, while Imran, by contrast, was a ‘titanically serious figure’ who was also 22 years her senior. Certainly the eventual outcome came as a surprise to the outside world and, to at least some in Pakistan, as a nasty shock. There was something approaching hysteria among the populist end of the media in both Karachi and Lahore. The state radio presenters who read out the announcement appeared to be commentating on the final stages of the World Cup, and one o
f them forgot himself and bellowed an anguished ‘No-ooo!’ live on the air, as though an Englishman had just unfairly taken the last Pakistani wicket.
Both Imran and Jemima were well liked by some, but despised by others. Very few people had a neutral opinion, and even some of those who liked one or both of them individually were perturbed by the idea of them being together. In any event, the couple had their work cut out for them. Writing a century before the fateful meeting at Annabel’s, Rudyard Kipling had observed, ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’ It’s become a universal and perhaps somewhat tired aphorism. But it’s still true that many of those who have attempted to settle in Pakistan over the years have encountered difficulties when it comes to transplanting themselves into the host society. In the 1980s, the impoverished state went through its own version of a Cultural Revolution. Violent upheavals brought about by General Zia’s Islamicisation campaign, and exacerbated by local grievances, included a series of occasional, bloody attacks on British and American interests both in Karachi and the other major cities. Religious tensions were inflamed, and in Multan in July 1988 an Anglican chapel was burnt to the ground, after which crowds took to the streets demanding the removal of ‘filth’ from their community, the signal for the Western press to make one of its periodic moral flyovers to condemn this apparent breach of hospitality. It was not an entirely isolated lapse. An officially tolerated harassment of at least some Western immigrants, with numerous reported instances of assault, lasted well into the 1990s. It would only be fair to add that, in turn, many expatriate Pakistanis continued to feel themselves less than fully embraced by modern British society.
The challenges of biculturalism had been an obvious theme for Imran himself ever since the day in April 1971 when his mother had packed him off on his first tour of England, with the words, ‘Don’t bring back a foreign wife.’ Mrs Khan had been concerned that an outsider would never come to terms with the unique qualities of Pakistani life. As Imran wrote in his autobiography, ‘She felt that to expect a Western girl to adapt to our culture was asking far too much, and that sooner or later the whole thing would break up … I always assumed that I would follow in the footsteps of my older cousins, three of whom went to Oxbridge and came back to arranged marriages in Pakistan.’
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