Imran Khan

by Christopher Sandford

  Cricket itself still played quite a prominent part in Imran’s routine. Pakistan suffered the latest of their now seemingly perennial World Cup disappointments in the tournament staged in South Africa in early 2003. Rock bottom likely came in the match against India at Centurion Park, played in front of 20,000 vocally partisan fans and a television audience implausibly estimated at a billion. Largely thanks to Tendulkar scoring 98 from 75 balls, the Indians won by six wickets. The Pakistan board subsequently disposed of eight senior players, including the captain Waqar Younis, Wasim Akram and Saeed Anwar. ‘After [that], a lot of my friends asked me to intervene, and despite my commitments in politics I have agreed to help with coaching,’ said Imran, speaking at the launch of a network of regional training clinics later that spring. Unfortunately, the much heralded new dawn of Pakistani cricket proved illusory. Twelve months later, after the national team again lost both a one-day and Test series to India, there was to be further upheaval. Javed Miandad lost his job as head coach for the fourth time, Inzamam returned as captain and the PCB’s chairman General Tauqir Zia stepped down after questions were raised about the selection of his son Junaid for the national side. There was some further obsessive tinkering by the board with the game’s domestic structure, but nothing substantial. ‘Departmental cricket, played between corporations, is a joke,’ Imran told the newspaper Dawn. ‘I have contacted the PCB [and] they assured me that this structure will be removed from next year. Who can say what will happen? This is Pakistan, where things change overnight.’ Imran also commented on the frequency with which the board altered the names of the various first-class tournaments. ‘One doesn’t even know which trophy is being played for any more,’ he complained.

  On 18 December 2002, Imran’s cousin Javed Burki, 64, was arrested by the National Accountability Bureau, or NAB, run these days by the army. NAB had long had a civilian equivalent, but had been revamped by President Musharraf, who was said to be not wholly averse to employing it against his political opponents. Burki, the country’s former Test captain, was detained in his capacity as chairman of the Pakistan Automobile Corporation, a company that supplied vehicles to the military. There were said to have been delays in the firm’s delivery of a fleet of some 3,000 Yasoob trucks. Burki would spend more than six months languishing in a Karachi gaol without formal charges being brought against him. Not surprisingly, he emerged a visibly diminished figure: he could ‘barely walk’ on his release, according to published reports. Burki’s ordeal inevitably put an additional strain on relations between Imran and the Musharraf administration. I was authoritatively told that the whole affair was ‘a [case] of personal vindictiveness. The Yasoob lorries had fallen behind track, as such things do, in 1999, yet it was only three years later that [Burki] was dragged away from his home in Islamabad. By a curious coincidence, it happened to be the same month that Imran had publicly refused to do business with the Musharraf coalition. As a result, anyone connected to the Khan family soon grew used to being treated by the government as outcasts, even outlaws.’*

  It was a view that might have been shared by Imran’s estranged wife, who remained in London, gradually reacquainting herself with what she had once called ‘the transient pleasures derived from the high life and nightclubs’. In late 2003, Jemima took out a full-page advertisement in several Pakistani newspapers, declaring, ‘It is certainly not true that Imran and I are having difficulties in our marriage. This is a temporary arrangement, and Inshallah [God willing] I will be coming back to Pakistan once my studies are finished and the building of our new farmhouse is complete.’ If the overall intention of the exercise had been to put an end to the speculation about the couple’s relationship, it appears to have been only partially successful. When a state president also happens to be a military dictator, his political opponents’ misfortunes naturally enjoy widespread press coverage. Over the next few months, most of the Islamabad and Karachi media duly competed to run increasingly lurid articles about Imran’s ‘failed’ marriage.

  None of these problems, however, appeared to impair his legendary self-confidence. On 1 April 2004, India completed their rout of Pakistan in the first Test of the series at Multan. The winning margin of an innings and 52 runs was, for the moment, India’s most emphatic victory in their otherwise largely grim 72-year history of cricket away from home. Imran briefly appeared at the ground on the final morning. In what was reported to be an ‘action-packed cameo time[d] at exactly six minutes’ he criticised the pitch, made various points to Shoaib Akhtar about the position of his leading arm and to Mohammad Sami about his field placings, queried a bat-pad decision against Inzamam, delivered himself of one or two other strictures on Pakistan’s technical shortcomings, and then left again as quickly as he had come. A fortnight later, the Indians won the Rawalpindi Test by an innings and 131 runs. The veteran commentator Omar Kureishi described the fourth and final day there as ‘the blackest in Pakistan’s cricket history’. It was the end of Javed’s latest tenure as coach; a month later the PCB’s chief executive, Ramiz Raja, caved in after barely a year in office and resigned to spend more time with his family.

  On the morning of 13 May 2004, Imran’s former lover Sita White, or ‘Ana-Luisa’ as she had taken to calling herself, dropped dead of a pulmonary embolism just before starting her first yoga class of the day at a Los Angeles gym. She was 43. Short of money and a single mother, White had led what was described as a ‘druggy and purposeless existence’ in California, preoccupied with her decade-long struggle both to extract a larger share of her late father’s fortune and provide for her daughter, Tyrian. A court had ruled in her favour in her paternity suit against Imran. White had married twice in recent years, in 1996 to an actor and former ‘Marlboro Man’, Alan Marshall, and again in 2002 to John Ursich, an Argentinian waiter. At the time of her death she and Ursich were divorcing, with her levelling charges of abuse (which he denied) at her husband, and him accusing her of indulging in a diet of ‘nonstop vodka, steroids and cocaine’. The eulogy at White’s sparsely attended funeral was delivered by a New Mexico Tech graduate and hedge fund manager named Nicholas Camilleri. He took the opportunity to complain that White’s 48-year-old sister Carolina, an ex-model, had boycotted the service and had even gone to court to try and stop it from happening. As an alternative, Carolina announced that she would be holding her own, more exclusive vigil at her Beverly Hills home. Later that night the deceased’s body was returned to the police, who had yet to conclude whether or not they were investigating a possible homicide. Camilleri later conjectured that White would have enjoyed the chaotic arrangements following her death. ‘She was such a drama queen,’ he remarked.

  A year or so earlier, White had made a suicide attempt, saying that she had ‘had enough of begging for money’. Later, there had been a lengthy hospital stay after an unsuccessful course of cosmetic surgery. Following her recovery, White was introduced to Cameron and Richard Saxby, a married couple who had been involved in numerous lawsuits, including a later disproven case accusing Richard of having inflated the trading prices of stock in one of his companies, an ‘electric services’ entity called Keystone Energy. In March 1998, Keystone was obliged to ‘review’ a profit estimate that had doubled its share value overnight. There was some subsequent acrimony of a financial nature between the couple and White regarding the latter’s family funds. In a will predating these events, signed on 27 February 2004, White had appointed the Saxbys her executors and, if called upon, ‘full and responsible’ guardians for Tyrian. At the time she had known the couple for some three weeks. The will further stipulated that none of the following were to have any ‘custodial role’ in her daughter’s life: ‘My mother, Elizabeth Kalen De Vazquez, my sister Carolina Teresa White, my brother, Lucas Charles White, my stepmother, Victoria Ann White, also known as Victoria White Ogara, nor Imran Khan.’

  A month later, White drafted a letter to the Khans in Islamabad:

  Dear Imran and Jemima,

  I feel the time has come
to address the issue of Tyrian’s future. I want to make it clear that I have removed myself from the equation. This is not about me, this is not about revenge; it is about justice; justice for Tyrian.

  As we have been unable to come to any agreement in the past, I have taken the financial and emotional responsibility for Tyrian’s upbringing for the past 11 years. Acknowledgement of your obligation and responsibilities is long overdue.

  I am proposing that a trust in the amount of 10 million dollars be established for Tyrian … This proposal is a final offer to bring this issue to a close without legal intervention … I am requesting a response from you within seven days. Should you choose not to respond and agree to these terms, the fallout from media intervention in both Pakistan and the UK will be certain and out of my control.

  Whether on further reflection or legal advice, White never sent the letter. Seven days before she died, however, she formally removed the Saxbys as Tyrian’s guardians and named Jemima as their replacement. Although their fathers had occasionally done business together, the two women had never met. White appears to have been motivated by a genuine desire to, as she put it in the paperwork, ‘have the minor enjoy rights of access to both her natural families’. By all accounts, Tyrian and Jemima had taken to one another during the child’s periodic visits over the previous three summers. White also told a friend to whom she was close at the end of her life that she regretted having had to sue Imran to establish that he was Tyrian’s father, particularly at a time when ‘the CIA [were] after me’ and floods and a landslide had made her Los Angeles home ‘barely habitable’. In a subsequent move, she had had her daughter’s name legally changed to Tyrian Jade Britannia Khan White.

  Although still not publicly acknowledging paternity, Imran took the opportunity of Sita White’s death to issue a statement saying that he and Jemima were prepared to be Tyrian’s guardians. The Khans were further said to be ready to fly to Los Angeles ‘at a moment’s notice’. In the event this step wasn’t necessary, as White’s sister Carolina successfully petitioned a court for temporary custody of her niece. In time, Imran was said to have come to broadly support this arrangement. According to widely published reports, both he and Jemima continued to ‘speak to Tyrian by phone almost weekly’ and to send her flowers on her birthday. As of this writing, the now 17-year-old Tyrian remains under her maternal family’s care in California. Some misguided critics of Imran have suggested he behaved badly in the whole affair, but this can only have been further evidence of a narrowly partisan political attack.

  The timing of these events was particularly acute, as Imran and Jemima were then in the midst of formally ending their marriage. Matters appear to have come to a head for them in the early weeks of 2004. In another emanation of the ‘transient pleasures’ of nightclubs, Jemima had celebrated her 30th birthday that January with a lavish party at Annabel’s. Imran himself wasn’t present, but the guest list included the likes of Elle Macpherson, Calvin Klein and Taki, as well as various European pop and film stars. The seemingly ageless but actually 43-year-old Hugh Grant, then basking in the reviews of his role as the bouffant-haired prime minister in Love Actually, arrived with Princess Rosario of Bulgaria. Jemima was said to look ‘radiant’ in what was perhaps one of her less discreet dresses since she had converted to Islam, a low-cut, sequinned number from Yves St Laurent. By the summer of that year she and Grant (a ‘huge’ cricket fan) were London’s most public celebrity item, having rather bizarrely been voted the couple by whom a majority of visitors ‘would most like to be shown around the city’.

  ‘I sadly confirm that Jemima and I are divorced,’ Imran said in a statement issued from Islamabad on 21 June, the ninth anniversary of the couple’s civil wedding ceremony. ‘While Jemima tried her best to settle here, my political life made it difficult for her to adapt to life in Pakistan … This was a mutual decision and is clearly very sad for both of us. My home and my future is in Pakistan.’ Contrary to some impressions in the media, a divorce or annulment under Islamic law, although not handed out like coupons for a free pizza, as in the West, is a relatively painless affair that begins with a period of arbitration among the two parties and their families. If that fails, the couple go their separate ways, and the marriage is legally wound up three months later. There is only limited scope for adulterers to be punished by public whippings or any other such chastisement. Under the terms of the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act of 1939, a husband can seek ‘material redress’ if his wife deserts him, but it’s generally agreed that in this case Imran waived any claim he might have had to a multi-million-pound pay-off.

  Politics and presidential spite, and not Hugh Grant, were responsible for ending his marriage, Imran later insisted. ‘Jemima’s spirit was broken by personal attacks on her by the Musharraf regime in a bid to sink me,’ he said. ‘I think she gave up. She thought it was a never-ending struggle and she didn’t believe I would make it.’ Reports that he was hurt by her high-profile affair with Grant, or anyone else, were ‘nonsense’, Imran added. Falling back on another cricket analogy, he told a reporter, ‘If you lose a match and you’ve tried your best and fought till the end, you don’t actually mind losing. You accept it. It’s only if you haven’t done your best that you regret it. In this case I don’t have any regrets.’ There is certainly no evidence that he was any less strong-willed or single-minded in his marriage than was the case in his sports career.

  Divorced from his wife, separated from his children and with no party colleagues seated alongside him in parliament, Imran might have struck some as a forlorn figure in mid-term. He responded by immersing himself in both constituency and national affairs, showing a hitherto undiscovered talent for committee work. ‘I have never seen this man as focused as he was [that] year,’ a Tehreek-e-Insaf organiser told me. ‘More than anything else, [Imran] enjoyed presiding over party meetings and listening to the guys’ give-and-take. And he [realised] that he was now finally doing the things he had been talking about for years.’ That talking had mostly been public. When Imran did speak in private to ‘the guys’, it was quite often in a curious mixture of the narrowly specific and the sublimely Delphic. As a result it was sometimes up to other people, friends and staff alike, to interpret his wishes. He continued to command intense loyalty. At meetings, among his frequent exit lines were: ‘I will handle this’ and ‘We are all Pakistanis’.

  Back in London, Jemima’s tabloid reputation as a mantrap was almost certainly undeserved. She seems to have led an only moderately full social life before settling down into the relationship with Grant. There was also a series of highly polished articles appearing under her name in the Daily Telegraph. A well-placed source describes the guest list for the average Jemima dinner party as ranging from ‘minor European royalty, politicians, academics [and] fun international playboys like Taki right up to fabulously gormless pop stars who talked about Iraq’. It was a crowd Jemima was beginning to enjoy. They, in turn, were evidently fascinated by the inside stories and insights she would dispense about life in Islamabad, which, while challenging, she invariably spoke of with ‘respect and nostalgia’.

  Imran, for his part, maintained a dignified silence on his divorce. Most of the ‘million or so’ enquiries on the subject over the next five years were dead-batted away with usually polite, occasionally curt rebuffs about it being nobody else’s business. ‘Some of the greatest happiness I’ve ever had was during marriage,’ he remarked in 2009. ‘And of course the greatest lows were in the marriage, too, because of the peculiar way it went. Once my marriage went — and I’ve never tried harder in anything to make it work as my marriage — but once it was over you go through a period of sadness and pain, but never do I think about missing it, or living, or going back to it. You know, you just move on.’ The general hunch in the press was that the cultural divide had just been too great. James Goldsmith had made the most prescient assessment when, in another of his celebrated quips, he’d allegedly said of Imran, ‘He’ll make an excellent
first husband.’ Better, or inner, reasons for the break-up aren’t available to an author, and may not be even to the parties themselves. ‘The peculiar way it went’ is a suggestive phrase.

  In August 1982, Imran had announced: ‘I meet people [in England] and feel undercurrents of racism. It doesn’t affect me too much because I know England is not my home. But if I had children, I would not want them to grow up here in an atmosphere where there was racism. I’ve grown up with a lot of pride and I wouldn’t want my children ever to have to develop an inferiority complex in a society like this.’ Twenty-two years later, Imran’s two sons, being raised as Muslims, would find themselves spending nine months of the year in London, with school holidays and half-terms in Pakistan. The timeshare arrangement broadly appeared to suit all parties. ‘It’s not the situation you would choose for bringing up your kids, and I worry about them constantly, but it works,’ Imran says.

  For all his stirring pep-talks and political acumen, ‘the chairman’s specific accomplishments didn’t yet look like the stuff of history,’ one colleague and journalist confided. ‘Will marble tablets read: “He questioned the American adventure in Afghanistan”? Will our grandchildren recall in song and verse: “He deplored inequality”? … Sadly, it was more a question of the very best of intentions going unfulfilled.’ In parliament, Imran followed the mullahs’ lead on most domestic issues, declaring himself in favour of traditional religious schools and against such modern frivolities as mixed-sex running races, while talking in general terms about ‘rejuvenating’ Pakistan. Even some of those most sympathetic to his core anti-corruption message came to the conclusion that he was simply too fickle a politician. ‘Imran is essentially a do-gooder, but he has these half-baked ideas, the sort you would pick up at an airport,’ says Najam Sethi, both a friend and the editor of Pakistan’s Daily Times. ‘And now he’s caught in a no man’s land, satisfying neither liberals nor conservatives.’ About the one constant factor everyone could agree on was Imran’s success as a roving ambassador and fundraiser. On 8 July 2004, he was on hand to collect the Lifetime Achievement award at the annual Asian Jewel gala in London, for ‘acting as a figurehead for many international charities and working passionately and extensively’ on behalf of his hospital.