Imran Khan

by Christopher Sandford

  Twenty-four years after Mrs Khan had issued her edict, Imran announced his engagement to Jemima Goldsmith. The initial reaction to the news was everything his mother might have feared. In the words of one Goldsmith family member, ‘There was a brief pause, a momentary reflex of disbelief, then the fire storm broke with full fury.’

  Overnight, Imran was back on the front pages of all the tabloids. The overall tone of the coverage, both there and in the broadsheets, could be characterised as satirical. In the Daily Mail, Nigel Dempster enlightened his readers with the news that ‘Jemima will find herself in a back room in Lahore while men in pantaloons sit next door discussing fundamentalism. Culturally, it certainly won’t be SW1.’ Alluding to the same problem, Private Eye ran a picture of Imran and James Goldsmith on its front cover: in the speech bubbles, Imran was saying, ‘May I have your daughter’s hand?’ and his prospective father-in-law was replying, ‘Why? Has she stolen something?’ Perhaps wisely, Jemima herself reportedly spent most of her time at Ormeley Lodge, away from the press, while paparazzi ringed the estate’s perimeter, telephoto lenses at the ready. On one of the few occasions she ventured out, for a shopping trip to Knightsbridge, she was trailed up Brompton Road by a posse of ‘reporters, paparazzi and a persistent American tourist, all shout[ing] lewd endearments at her back’. Jemima glanced round once, scowled at the intrusion, then ran for the cover of a passing taxi.

  The reaction closer to home was described as ‘mixed’. James Goldsmith, for one, was not happy at the news. He complained, at length, to his estranged wife about it, citing Jemima’s cultural and religious differences from her fiancé, and demanding that she finish her degree at Bristol before even considering marriage. It’s conceivable that the furore reminded him of the events surrounding another inter-faith relationship some 40 years earlier. Then aged 21, Goldsmith had asked a Bolivian tin magnate named Antenor Patio for permission to marry his daughter Maria, who was 18, and pregnant. Patio reportedly replied, ‘We are not in the habit of marrying Jews.’ At that the young couple had eloped, only for Maria to suffer what proved to be a fatal stroke in her seventh month of pregnancy; their daughter, Isabel, was delivered by Caesarean section. (It should be stressed here that, despite an awkward start, Goldsmith fully reconciled himself to Imran, whose ‘natural charm [and] intelligence’ he enthused about for the rest of his life.) Meanwhile, the various reports, features, editorials and gossip doing the rounds in Pakistan practically paralysed the normal workings of the nation’s media. There would be widespread and ongoing references to Jemima’s ‘Zionism’, and a general reaction in the country as a whole that ranged from amusement to stupefaction. (Again, this was in contrast to the ‘extremely warm and supportive’ Khan family response.) As Imran ruefully acknowledged, ‘I suppose if my marriage proved one point, it is that I am not a politician.’

  On 16 May 1995, the couple went through a two-minute Islamic wedding ceremony in Paris, where James Goldsmith had a home. The bride wore traditional Pakistani dress and revealed that she had been taking instruction in her husband’s religion. Press reports that Jemima now ‘spoke Urdu fluently’ proved premature, however. Nor had she ‘thrown away her wardrobe of couture dresses’, ‘swor[n] to become a devout Muslim’ or ‘legally changed her name to Jamila Haiqa’, all of which appeared in the press. It was a deliberately low-key, family-only occasion. Belying what Today called her reputation as ‘the Material Girl of the Sloane set’, with an ‘extremely healthy acquisitive streak’, Jemima asked that in lieu of wedding presents her friends make a donation to the Shaukat Khanum hospital.

  Five weeks later (after a paparazzo had snapped them consummating their marriage on a hotel balcony), Imran and Jemima went through a civil ceremony at Richmond Register Office, followed by a reception at Ormeley Lodge. This was perhaps more in line with what Today and others had had in mind. There was evidently a great deal of vintage champagne drunk, though none of it by the groom. Princess Michael of Kent, Elle Macpherson and David Frost were among the guests. Later that summer, the newlyweds left for Pakistan. As usual where Imran was involved, there was an animated group of reporters and photographers waiting for the couple on their arrival at Lahore airport. Although Imran was ‘beaming’, Jemima looked ‘pale and drawn’. For someone who later gave her three least favourite activities as ‘flying, having my picture taken and giving interviews’, it was a faintly ominous start to married life.

  The next few years would be a difficult time for Jemima, in some respects more so than for her husband. Frequently ill and continually homesick, she was also mercilessly targeted by Imran’s political enemies. Nor had she ever quite taken to his other great love aside from his family and his hospital. Challenged once to name her three favourite fast bowlers, Jemima replied, ‘Um, you’ve got me. Luckily, Imran retired long before I met him. I’m bored by cricket, [and] frankly I wouldn’t know the difference between a fast bowler and a slow one.’

  Although no longer representing the BCCP, Imran himself continued to be a significant figure behind the scenes. Despite everything, he still enjoyed the sport — ‘the greatest game that man ever devised’, he told a reporter — and the pleasure was evident in his schedule. Three years after his retirement, Imran was showing up at Test matches, hosting parties for his favourite players, offering ad hoc coaching, writing articles, passing off opinions on this matter and that, doing everything possible, it seemed, not to lose touch with the only real world he’d known between the ages of 18 and 40. With the passage of time he was becoming noticeably mellower towards old opponents, although, as one of them puts it, ‘He was perfectly civil, but that was it. With Imran, you always felt you weren’t getting so much friendship as friendliness. He’d wave if he saw you, but you could wait a lifetime for him to answer a letter.’ Mike Vockins, the long-serving secretary at Worcestershire, remembers an incident when he was on the way to Pakistan as manager of the England ‘A’ team in November 1995. ‘Imran had been spotted at Heathrow by a couple of the players, but he and Jemima were whisked through to the first-class lounge. When we were up in the air I sent a message to first-class via one of the attendants suggesting we might meet up — for old time’s sake, and also because I felt that Nasser Hussain might value talking with him about cricket in Pakistan. Imran might have been sleeping, or felt it better to look after his wife, but he declined the offer.’ Other old colleagues Imran came across would broadly agree that he was a ‘nice bloke’, ‘very civil’ or even ‘chummy’, but that if you ‘look[ed] to him for an emotional commitment, you made a big error’. One particularly well-known former Packer star took some classes in psychology in the 1980s, and now believes that Imran was ‘the sort of guy who’s not at his best one-to-one … He’s happier playing a role, performing to a sea of undifferentiated faces.’

  Of course, just because he’d gone on to other things, it didn’t mean that Pakistan’s World Cup-winning captain had suddenly become one of those peculiarly sensitive politicians who don’t care to dwell too much on their past. Imran had a clear and unshakeable belief in his place somewhere near the top of cricket’s hall of fame, a claim that by and large proved more justifiable as time went on. His national team’s fortunes did not conspicuously improve in his absence. Wasim’s captaincy proved only partly successful, and led to a players’ revolt broadly similar to the one against Javed 12 years earlier. The board eventually turned to Imran’s old bte noire Salim Malik to lead the team. This appointment, too, was not met with universal enthusiasm. A year or two later, three Australian players alleged that Salim had offered them £130,000 each to throw a Test match. According to one English Sunday tabloid, the Pakistan captain unwittingly admitted to them that he could ‘fix any game’ on a subsequent tour for £50,000. A board of inquiry sitting in Lahore would later hear that an unlicensed bookmaker named Pervez had gone to the Pakistan team hotel with $100,000 concealed in ‘his inner garments’ to distribute to certain players. The tabloid went on to break the less than sensational news that the
re was ‘heavy illegal betting’ going on in subcontinental cricket. The Pakistani board responded by prohibiting the use of mobile phones in their team’s dressing-room. An anti-corruption panel later banned Salim and the bowler Ata-ur-Rehman for life.

  Overall, cricket’s sixth World Cup, hosted jointly by Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka in early 1996, was not one to savour fondly for the ages. The tournament both began and ended in logistical chaos and what Wisden described as ‘regrettable’ scenes of mob violence. There were subsequent calls for the arrest of the head of the organising committee, PILCOM, on a charge of wasting public money. Pakistan’s selectors began their team’s defence of the title by reinstating the 39-year-old Javed in the side. A similar recall for Imran was discussed ‘at the highest level’, I was told. It would have had a ‘strong psychological impact’, one of the board recalls. ‘Before Khan, captains were seen but rarely heard. He virtually created the modern team boss, but my understanding was that he wanted nothing more to do with politics, at least of the cricket sort.’ Imran did, however, appear at the ground for Pakistan’s quarter-final tie against India at Bangalore, where Javed recalls seeing him ‘chatting away with Wasim Akram’ as the team practised. Wasim, who was carrying a side strain, controversially pulled out of the match just before the start, leading conspiracy theorists to speculate that he might have withdrawn as part of a fix. Although there’s no evidence to suggest anything of the sort, the reigning world champions went on to lose the tie by 39 runs.

  The news was particularly ill received back in Pakistan. One fan reportedly shot his television and then himself, while Wasim was subjected to outrageous insults in sections of the press. Angry crowds demonstrated outside his home, where they burnt his family and him in effigy. Javed then took the opportunity to announce his final retirement; his criticism of the board for having ignored his strategic views throughout the competition was met with a certain official disdain. Sri Lanka went on to beat Australia in the cup final at Lahore. The awards ceremony was marred by a televised shoving match between supporters and opponents of Prime Minister Bhutto, who presented the trophy. In that one brief moment in front of the reviewing stand, the Imran era effectively came to an end. All had not gone well since his retirement, either for the team or himself — the ball-tampering row, ructions with Javed, Wasim and Waqar incarcerated in the West Indies, the allegations against Salim and others, a spate of coups and resignations among the board, ongoing captaincy issues and the final, bitter pill of the World Cup loss to India. But now, Imran told a reporter who asked him about a possible comeback, it was ‘all history’.

  Jemima Goldsmith’s transformation into a Pakistani housewife would long be a topic of amusement among both the press and some of her friends. It was not quite a case, as Nigel Dempster had suggested, of being cooped up in a back room ‘while men in pantaloons [sat] next door discussing fundamentalism’. The Khans’ compound in Lahore was spacious, tastefully furnished and decidedly opulent by most local standards. There was a high wall between the house and the street. ‘Fundamentalism’ seems not to have featured on the list of typical dinner-table conversations, which were more likely to be dominated by the latest concerns at the hospital. Even so, Jemima essentially found herself in the position of a young bride sharing a roof with several of her extended family. ‘When I went to Pakistan, there were definitely things that I found very, very hard,’ she remarked some time later. ‘I think, my God, how did I live five years with Imran’s whole clan, who I was very close to? I mean, I really liked and respected them, but obviously, they lived very, very differently, and there was his father and his two sisters and their husbands and children, there were 10 children in the house, and kind of a chaotic environment and, you know, I do think, how did I do that?’

  According to the Khans’ friend Yusuf Salahudin, speaking to the press some years later, Jemima found it relatively easy to adapt to the role expected of a woman in Pakistan. There were ‘few or no problems’ when it came to such matters as wearing the appropriate dress in public. He praised her dogged and ultimately successful attempts to master Urdu, and to assimilate in other key ways. Even so, certain ‘teething issues’ remained. ‘Every time Jemima came here she would fall ill,’ Salahudin recalled. ‘She particularly suffered from amoebic dysentery. When she visited [one] April, she was hospitalised for three days.’ As the marriage progressed, Jemima began to spend up to four months of every year in London, or on the Goldsmiths’ estates in Paris, Spain and Mexico. The whole process must have been grim to someone who so hated flying. While in Lahore, Jemima spent much of her life in purdah, largely hidden from public view, although once an enterprising paparazzo caught a well-shaped ankle on film as it emerged from a chauffeur-driven car. The picture showing the transgression was never published, but pirated copies of it later did a brisk trade on the internet.

  Not long into their marriage, the Khans commissioned the building of a seven-bedroomed house in the Margalla hills north of Islamabad. Although not exactly tranquil — a dawn chorus of Rhesus monkeys, jackals and exotic birds could be heard cackling away in the surrounding bush — the property at least afforded Imran and Jemima the privacy that was lacking in Lahore. Several friends who visited the estate described it as a sort of Asian Berghof craning out over Islamabad, with sweeping views of the Himalayan foothills. Unfortunately, due to the familiar construction delays it would be early 2000 before the new home was finally ready to be occupied. For five years Jemima bided her time in the ‘chaotic environment’ of Lahore, where she was apt to bump into a stray in-law in the corridor if she happened to get up to leave her room at night. Imran was often away at the hospital until late, sometimes returning home only after a protracted official dinner.

  ‘On politics, I’m very interested yet remain fairly neutral,’ Imran had written in his first autobiography in 1983. Five years later, in the book’s sequel All Round View, he revealed a new-found concern for Pakistan’s depressing litany of military coups, civil wars, assassinations and institutionalised corruption — and more specifically for the country’s appalling healthcare facilities of the sort that had contributed to his mother’s early death. Imran’s political development also came to include what opponents such as Benazir Bhutto called his ‘romantic socialism’ and his ‘cleverly cynical balancing act’ — promising increased national security while simultaneously decrying the traditional military budget — a stance his admirers lauded as a brilliant synthesising of time-honoured patriotic ideology with the social realities of the modern age. ‘No matter how naive this may sound, I would like to see disarmament take place, not only between India and Pakistan, but worldwide,’ Imran said. ‘I see no difference between money made out of arms trading and that which is made through the drug trade. Both are evil.’

  Although increasingly free with an opinion, Imran didn’t show any personal affinity for politics until well into the 1990s. One of his English county cricket team-mates told me of an incident in the 1980s, after the TCCB introduced random drug tests.

  If your name was pulled out of a hat, you had to go with your team doctor and pee in a jar, which would then be borne off to the authorities. Imran’s turn duly came up, and as a result of making a big performance about not wanting to relieve himself in public he was eventually able to submit a specimen which mysteriously contained a high quantity of Harvey’s ale, a drink which to my knowledge Immy had never consumed. ‘That could have been the end of my political ambitions,’ he said, which in 10 years was the only time I’d heard him refer to them.

  There is certainly no suggestion that Imran at any stage took performance-enhancing or recreational drugs. This fastidiousness his team-mate remembers would be very much in keeping with his lifelong sense of personal dignity.

  In the words of another county colleague, ‘The only party Imran showed any interest in joining when I knew him was the one going on at Tramp.’ That was perhaps to underestimate his ability to be both platitudinous and aggressively populist, and a deepl
y ingrained work ethic that was always going to find a new outlet for itself. ‘The motivation for politics came from a genuine desire to make social change,’ Imran recalled in 2008. ‘The reason I thought I would succeed was actually my training from cricket. It made me believe nothing was impossible. As long as you don’t give up, you can win from incredible situations. So long as you fought to the last ball, I always believed you could win.’

  While fundraising for his hospital, Imran increasingly began to look to the political stage as a means to modernise Pakistan’s ‘Dickensian’ social services and effect other critical public sector reforms. By 1994–5 his speeches dealt with current issues and were delivered before partisan audiences. Even so, a number of colleagues would come to express a mixture of surprise and concern at his eventual career choice. Javed Miandad remarks that he was ‘amazed’, since Imran ‘used to be one to always shun politics and I never thought it would be his calling’. A rather closer friend, Yusuf Salahudin, advised Imran not to get involved. ‘Politics in this country is a dirty game and he’s altogether too straightforward and honest for it.’ Others were more narrowly concerned with Imran’s personal safety. The life expectancy of even a well-connected Pakistani lawmaker didn’t inspire confidence. In the autumn of 1996, Murtaza Bhutto, the prime minister’s younger brother, had come home to Karachi after a long period in exile to contest the leadership of the family party on the twin promise of a ‘radically altruistic’ welfare programme and ‘sweeping’ anti-corruption reforms if elected. The exact events that followed on the afternoon of 20 September remain open to dispute. But it’s agreed that Murtaza and his aides were driving home from a campaign rally on the outskirts of town when up to 80 police officers opened fire on his convoy. According to witnesses, Murtaza had emerged from his car with his hands raised above his head, at which point the police ‘frenziedly’ raked the whole party with automatic weapons. The slaughter went on for some six minutes. In the silence that followed, the police are said to have circled the bodies with pistols, administering the coup de grce to Murtaza and several others with a shot to the back of the neck. In all seven men died in the assault. Although savage even by the notoriously brutal standards of Pakistani politics, it was a not unfamiliar fate for those who challenged the status quo. Several people I spoke to admitted, with good reason, to being worried about Imran’s welfare.