Imran Khan

by Christopher Sandford

  Imran later indignantly claimed that he had been misquoted by India Today, whose ‘shock exclusive’ saw him marching incautiously into the minefield of the British class system. Whereas ‘educated, Oxbridge types’ such as Christopher Martin-Jenkins, Tony Lewis and Derek Pringle all took a rational view of the tampering debate, the same could not be said of Imran’s critics. ‘Look at the others: Lamb, Botham, Trueman,’ he allegedly said. ‘The difference in class and upbringing makes a difference.’

  In an attempt to correct the record, Imran wrote to Botham on 6 June 1994, assuring him that he had ‘not once called anyone lower class or under class’ since he ‘didn’t believe in the class system’. He went on to remark that he had ‘never intended this issue to get personal’ and had simply wanted the ICC to ‘define what were the acceptable limits of ball-tampering’, a practice that ‘has gone on ever since the game has been played’. As a goodwill gesture, Imran’s letter appears to have been only partially successful. Just two days later, Botham’s solicitor Alan Herd replied by saying, ‘You have grossly libelled Ian’ and demanding a public apology. Imran, in turn, offered to write an open letter to The Times to ‘clear up any confusions about racist or class slurs’, which he felt were largely the result of India Today having distorted his original comments. Again, it wasn’t enough. On 21 July, Botham instructed Herd to issue a writ of libel to Imran, and Allan Lamb then followed suit. (The third man allegedly smeared, Fred Trueman, told me that he had better things to do with his time than ‘sit on my arse waiting for some court’ to entertain a defamation charge, which was ‘best settled over a pint’ — an eminently sane formula, if not a very practical one in Imran’s case.)

  As Trueman said, ‘the entire balls-up’ essentially stemmed from events that had taken place in various past England-Pakistan matches, chiefly in 1992, and never been fully resolved. The circumstances were somehow right for a climactic legal shoot-out between the two nations’ most talented and charismatic players. Imran, for his part, was reacting not only to Botham’s specific complaint but to a swelling chorus of ‘condescension and abuse’ that had given rise over the years to headlines such as the Sun’s ‘BLOODY CHEATS’. The Pathan code of honour demanded satisfaction. ‘Botham totally over-reacted and took the whole thing too personally,’ Imran told me. ‘All I was ever trying to do was to start a debate about what ball-tampering really was. The [suit] was completely unnecessary. I’m a man of peace. But I’m going to respond when someone attacks me or attacks the Pakistan team.’ It was as if the Imran-Botham feud was a test of nationhood by proxy. In the midst of the more narrowly defined libel proceedings, both the principal parties seemed to be fighting a substitute Test match with their respective countries’ virtue at stake. ‘Charged’ was the word most seasoned cricket watchers used to describe the atmosphere at the time the case finally came to court, where Imran, Botham and Lamb each went into the witness box to air his views on patriotism, race and class, although, to the fascinated observer from the New York Times, ‘they might as well have exchanged their formal attire for the helmet and chain mail of the medieval jouster’.

  The summer of 1996 was an unusually fraught one even by the recent standards of English cricket. At the World Cup, the national team had ‘resembled a bad-tempered grandmother attending a teenage rave’, according to Wisden. ‘Unable to comprehend what was happening, on the field or off it, the players just lingered, looking sullen as well as incompetent.’ The team then narrowly beat India and were heftily defeated by Pakistan in the English home season. Ray Illingworth’s three-year reign as chairman of selectors and all-purpose supremo ended in some disarray. To compound a miserable term, the TCCB fined Illingworth for having brought the game into disrepute by comments he made in his autobiography, and then promptly wound itself up in favour of its replacement, the England and Wales Cricket Board. In an unpromising start for a body which pledged itself to remove factionalism and restore plain-talking, it was to be known by the acronym ECB, the ‘and Wales’ apparently having died at birth. But the season’s principal drama took place over two weeks at the High Court in London, where Imran arrived each morning accompanied by his radiantly pregnant wife. By some mischievous quirk of the legal calendar, the hearing overlapped with the first Test between England and Pakistan at Lord’s, with which it shared certain broad and often unintentionally comic characteristics. Pakistan won the match, in the course of which live TV pictures showed Waqar apparently doctoring the ball, by 164 runs.

  In his defence, Imran had prudently engaged the services of George Carman, QC, by popular consent the most able, and feared, barrister of his generation. The thrice married, hard-drinking Carman had built up a client list over 40 years at the bar that included the likes of Jeremy Thorpe, Richard Branson, Mohamed Al Fayed, Elton John, Ken Dodd, Tom Cruise and the Yorkshire Ripper’s wife Sonia Sutcliffe. It would be fair to say that he favoured a robust cross-examining technique, and could be castratingly rude when the occasion called for it. Carman began his 14 hours’ questioning of Ian Botham by asking the former England star if he was a drug-taking liar who cheated on his wife. Botham admitted to a certain amount of pot use over the years. It would, perhaps, have been hard for him to deny, since he had already spoken of it at some length in a front-page interview in the Mail on Sunday. However, Botham assured the court that ‘my wife and I have a very successful marriage, thank you’. In a subsequent exchange, Carman read out the unpublished letter that Imran had offered to send to The Times two years earlier. After a suitable pause, he then walked slowly to the witness box, leant forward and said, ‘In the interests of the great name of cricket and to avoid a blood battle in the courts, and in the interests of good relations between the Pakistani cricket team and the England team, did you not think that Mr Khan made a fair and eminently reasonable proposal?’ ‘No, I did not,’ said Botham.

  After three days of largely inconclusive sparring, Carman introduced the first of a series of star witnesses. The former England wicket-keeper Bob Taylor appeared in court to don a pair of red and black Mitre gauntlets that an usher reverentially handed him wrapped in tissue paper inside a blue satin-lined box. ‘They will probably bring back memories,’ Carman purred. Mr Justice French asked, in more businesslike fashion, ‘Do you recognise those gloves?’ ‘Very well,’ replied Taylor. ‘I wore them during the incident.’

  The ‘incident’ in question happened during the India Test at The Oval in 1982, when Botham was seen throwing the ball to Taylor who, according to counsel, ‘vigorously agitated’ it in his palms before returning it. Imran had alleged that this was done to alter the condition of the ball, in match circumstances that had apparently favoured the batsman. (Botham had scored a double century in the Test, managing to dislodge several tiles from the pavilion roof in the process, but took only two wickets.) ‘Is there any truth in the extremely grave imputation that you were trying to remove the lacquer off that ball?’ asked Charles Gray, QC, counsel for Botham and Lamb. ‘None whatsoever,’ replied Taylor, who assured the jury he had merely been ‘wiping condensation off the surface’. Later in the session, the Warwickshire and England medium-pacer Gladstone Small told the court that he believed seam-picking was common practice among bowlers, although he personally had never done it. Later still Geoff Boycott took strike, flourishing aloft a Reebok cricket boot, with which he hoped to expound on some ball-scuffing procedures. But first the legendary England opener requested three minutes of the court’s time in order to make a personal statement about his former Yorkshire colleague Brian Close. Close had earlier appeared as a witness for Botham and Lamb and had replied ‘No comment’ when asked whether Boycott was an honest man. After heated objections by Charles Gray, the judge intervened to disallow Boycott’s impromptu speech. ‘It appears this witness’s evidence is in danger of getting completely out of control. I think he should now leave the witness stand. You are released,’ he said. ‘That’s a pity,’ Boycott replied.

  Meanwhile, Imran’s lawyers had succ
eeded in serving subpoenas on both the current England captain Mike Atherton and the team coach David Lloyd. Atherton arrived in court direct from Lord’s, where the five-day match with Wasim Akram’s Pakistan was scheduled to start the following morning. The final England practice session was cancelled as a result. Sharp-eyed observers didn’t miss the point that this meant a former Pakistan captain had at least inadvertently managed to sabotage his nation’s opponents on the eve of a Test. Atherton had the impression that the jury were ‘totally confused and bored’ by the intricacies of reverse swing and ball-tampering, but riveted by the sight of Imran’s entourage. ‘As I stood in the witness box, with Jemima Khan’s big doey eyes looking balefully, first at the jurors and then at me, I feared for Botham and the outcome of the case,’ he says. Atherton fared better in court than some. Belying his nickname of ‘the Judge’, the South African-born, Hampshire and England batsman Robin Smith seemed to be perplexed by some of the legalese during his appearance in the box. ‘Jeez, your honour,’ he protested. ‘I’m only a simple cricketer.’

  Charles Gray, for the plaintiffs, then questioned Kathy Botham, who confirmed that Imran’s class aspersions had made her and her husband ‘furious’. Lyndsey Lamb broadly echoed the sentiment. George Carman declined to cross-examine either woman, but again drew the jury’s attention to Imran’s offer to put the whole matter to rest by writing to The Times. ‘There was an opportunity, one might say a golden opportunity, to bury the allegations for ever. Did they take it? Oh no. Why not?’ he enquired.

  Eight days into the proceedings, Imran took the stand to deny that he had ever called anyone in cricket a cheat. ‘Nor have I ever at any stage in my life believed in a class system,’ he added, rattling off his answers so rapidly that the judge was more than once forced to implore, ‘Please slow down. You are going at fast bowler pace.’ ‘I don’t look at people and what class they belong to,’ he insisted. ‘I never have. Those kind of comments are against everything in the way I was brought up.’ Imran, who swore an oath to Allah on the Koran, giving his full names as Imran Ahmed Khan Niazi, conceded that his proposed open letter might have struck the plaintiffs as something less than a full-scale expression of regret. ‘I was not prepared to apologise for something I’d never said. I wasn’t going to lie and say I called them this and that, and then grovel for it,’ he remarked. It may be that Imran considered the matter overnight, because the next morning he withdrew his defence plea of justification and told the court that, having listened to evidence in the trial, he now accepted that Botham had never tampered with a cricket ball. ‘I have heard Ian and I have heard David Gower, and I respect them both. And if they say they were squeezing the ball — fine; they were squeezing the ball,’ he said of an incident in the Lord’s Test of 1982. For all that, he still had certain technical reservations about his fellow all-rounder’s career. Botham had ‘not realised his potential’, Imran told the court, and had ‘blamed everyone else’ for the shortcoming. It was ‘a shame’. Imran added that both he and Richard Hadlee were older than Botham, but as their world ratings went up, his fell. ‘He never fulfilled his promise, I felt … He [was] a bitter man’ who took out his frustrations on the selectors, his opponents, his team-mates, the media, ‘everyone but himself’, for being ‘shunted out of cricket in an undignified way’.

  After deliberating overnight, the jury returned a 10–2 majority verdict in Imran’s favour. Thanking them for their service, the judge called the proceedings a ‘complete exercise in futility’. Each side was required to pay its own costs. Botham and Lamb appealed the decision, but eventually withdrew their claim in 1999, by which time they faced estimated legal bills of £260,000 and £140,000 respectively. Ten years later, the heat of the moment appeared to have given way to a lingering mutual coolness. The normally effusive Botham told me, ‘I have nothing to say about Imran Khan. I don’t want to give him the time or the publicity.’ (Botham had previously remarked, ‘I don’t suppose Imran and I will ever be sharing a dinner table again, and that’s something that doesn’t keep me awake at night.’) In broadly similar vein, Allan Lamb wrote: ‘Many thanks for your enquiry with regards to Khan, but I am not interested in getting involved.’ One’s tempted to ask whether the whole thing could have been settled out of court as Fred Trueman had suggested. Or, as one star witness speculated, did the highly public and expensive wrangling meet some deeper need to redress years of perceived ‘imperial arrogance’ on one side and ‘chippy resentment’ on the other? Perhaps the parties themselves couldn’t have resolved such subtleties of motivation. In later years, Imran seemed to incline towards the judge’s view of the proceedings. ‘It was completely unnecessary and a terrible, draining experience for everyone,’ he told me. ‘The justice system works in a mysterious way, although I suppose it at least prepared me for a political career.’

  If the publicity-shy Jemima had ‘loathed’ the public exposure of sitting in court, worse was to come. Imran threw himself into the 1997 legislative elections, despite initial opposition from his wife, who reportedly thought him ‘crazy’ to run, and his own private misgivings about exposing a party that was still only six months old to the charms of the Pakistani democratic cycle. Rather understandably, Jemima seems to have had doubts about the wisdom of seeking to lead a highly visible political life while simultaneously raising a young family: the couple’s first son Sulaiman Isa was born on 18 November 1996, and a second, Qasim, followed on 10 April 1999. Jemima told one friend in London that she hated being in the spotlight because she liked to be able ‘to shop at Harrods and not be recognised’. Many might have shared her qualms about the stress attendant on Pakistani public life. A 14-hour-a-day gerbil wheel of redrafting some party policy document while being attacked by everyone from the prime minister to Javed Miandad must have tested even Imran’s inner reserves. (Jemima did, however, ‘enthusiastically endorse’ her husband’s passion for environmentalism, something of a Goldsmith family cause célbre, and delivered a well-received keynote address to the International Green Network conference at the University of Warwick in July 1997.) At least one close political friend of Imran’s came to see him as a sort of chameleon, adapting himself to the different people with whom he talked, ‘which must have put him under even more stress every day’. He did this, in the friend’s view, not out of cynical pandering, but because of his constant desire to ‘avoid personal confrontation, argument and unpleasantness’.

  For his first national campaign, Imran and the Tehreek-e-Insaf party declined a merger offer that supposedly would have guaranteed them 30 parliamentary seats, and instead announced a nine-point manifesto linked by a common theme:

  Freedom from political, economic, mental slavery

  Freedom from injustice

  Freedom from poverty

  Preedom from unemployment

  Freedom from homelessness

  Freedom from illiteracy

  Freedom to generate wealth

  Freedom from fear

  Freedom for women

  Amidst what a critic in the Pakistan Muslim League characterised as a ‘fuzzy agenda of romantic-Maoist mumblings’, Imran struck a more militant note by now actively supporting Pakistan’s nuclear programme. ‘Public testing has to be done to tell India that we have the bomb,’ he said. ‘My party is clear that we have to show them that we have a deterrent.’ International sanctions imposed as a result merely strengthened his conviction. ‘Most of us in Pakistan feel that we should not be dependent on development aid. National self-esteem suffers when our leaders have to go begging for money. We have to conduct reforms on our country and stand on our own feet.’

  There were moments when the 1997 campaign took an almost surreal turn even by accepted Pakistani political standards. As Jemima later recalled in an article in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘Imran was widely accused of being part of a Zionist conspiracy because of his marriage to a person with a Jewish father and a Jewish maiden name.’ In subsequent developments, ‘A mob of crazed mullahs insisted that my
citizenship be revoked, and that I be thrown out of the country … They took out full-page newspaper ads, inciting people to riot outside our home. Bearded fundos took to the streets with placards bearing my name (misspelt) and the word “infidel”.’ A blurred photocopy apparently showing a cheque for £40 million, supposedly from James Goldsmith to fund Imran’s party, appeared in a number of Karachi-area newspapers. It little mattered that the document in question was a crude forgery. Meanwhile, Nawaz Sharif and his Pakistan Muslim League issued a list of ‘Six questions for Tehreek-e-Insaf convener Mr Khan’, which accused him of having hired a London advertising agency and of once being an international playboy, among other apparent abuses of the Election Commission rules. The Bhuttos in turn had issues with the fledgeling party’s alleged practice of ‘doctoring television footage and photographs to make the size of their meetings look big’.

  Not surprisingly, the attacks eventually took their toll on the Khans’ marriage, particularly coming at a time when Jemima was reportedly already suffering from a combination of lingering culture shock and post-natal depression. ‘Because I was taking on the corrupt elite, my wife became a soft target,’ Imran says. ‘She was accused of insane things … Zionism … being part of a Jewish conspiracy to take over Pakistan. I thought it was so absurd I didn’t even take it seriously, but it had a big impact on her.’

  The Tehreek-e-Insaf’s charges of unsportsmanlike play weren’t, therefore, merely the fulminations of a poor loser. Apart from the personal vitriol, there were some curious events on the election day itself, including a case where a busload of Imran supporters presented themselves at a polling station in Lahore, only to be told that the officials there were ‘too busy’ to accommodate them. When the would-be voters returned an hour later, as directed, they found the building closed. Fraud, of course, is known to happen in Pakistan; but it does seem some particularly strange occurrences took place that Monday, 3 February. According to the official 12-man International Progress Organisation (IPO) team sent to monitor the elections, ‘the results cannot be considered free and fair because of violent interference in the voting procedures, intimidation of the electorate [and] administrative mishandling throughout.’ Among the stories cited by the IPO was that of a Muhammad Haneef, a polling agent in Karachi ‘who [was] abducted with three others (who managed to escape) by members of an armed faction. He was severely beaten and died. The delegation of the IPO inspected the dead body in the Abbasi Shahid hospital and spoke to the medical staff … It was reported to the delegation that Pakistani security forces who were present in and around polling stations did not prevent widespread kidnappings, coercions and violent assaults.’