‘The Cary Grant of London society’ finally realises his ambition
SO IT has come to pass: “Imran Khan, Prime Minister of Pakistan” blare out the headlines across the world. It is an astonishing achievement for the debonair dandy of Chelsea that I once knew.
“I’ve always wanted to be prime minister of my country,” he told me repeatedly with a glare like a hawk in the years since he left Jemima, his first wife.
I interviewed him for The Telegraph in 2010, when he was visiting London. It was a winter of deep snow and we were meeting in Annabel Goldsmith’s mansion, Ormley Lodge, which he uses as his London base when he flies over to visit Sulaiman and Kasim, his sons.
Despite his divorce from their mother, Jemima, in 2004, they are still a close family unit and his former mother-in-law was accustomed to welcoming him into her home.
Our paths first crossed on the London social scene in the Seventies – at dinner parties, dancing at Annabel’s (named after his future mother-in-law) in Mayfair, and playing backgammon at John Aspinall’s Clermont Club upstairs.
In those days, he was casually but breathtakingly good looking – easily the most handsome man I had ever seen – in the way only a brilliant athlete can be: fit, bright-eyed and lithe.
He was the Cary Grant of London society. Marie Helvin, the model and former Mrs David Bailey, one of the most stunning women of her time, sighed: “There is a scent to Imran that drives women crazy. Everyone falls for him.”
I first interviewed Imran a couple of years before he had even met Jemima, at his Chelsea bachelor pad. He told me how much he loved and missed his mother, whose jasmine bushes in Pakistan were such a vivid memory for him. His favourite scent, he confided, was Fracas, an extremely expensive jasmine-based perfume which reminded him of home.
He was devastated when his mother died of cancer after a difficult period of illness, and his first major political masterstroke was building a cancer hospital in Lahore in her name.
When I met him there, I would marvel at the way he was mobbed like a rock star by everyone from nurses to patients and their families.
He handled it all with grace and good manners – a style he developed over the years and has never lost.
He got together with Jemima, the daughter of one of the richest men in Europe and one of the most beautiful women on the London scene. Like a tigress, as wily as she was ferociously bright, she was 22 to his 40 when they married.
Not long after the marriage, I spent time with the couple in Pakistan, interviewing them in their new home about his burgeoning political career and his wife’s new fashion business.
The depth of their relationship then
‘There is a scent to Imran that drives women crazy, everyone falls for him’
was clear, as was his political ambition. He was beginning to travel the country, to rally supporters, but back then victory seemed a long way off. Benazir Bhutto, his friend from Oxford, where he studied PPE, was still all-powerful.
His own power was always going to come from the personal magnetism which had been so on show in those heady London days. As he honed and developed his political muscle it was this charisma that has got him through the pain barrier of Pakistani politics.
Today, he rides an armoured car through a land blighted by corruption. “I want to make sure the poor and the dispossessed, the widows and the vulnerable are taken care of ”, he told me on that snowy day in Richmond. He was saying this decades ago and if he did not mean it, the people would know by now.
I remember when I was in Pakistan, sitting and listening to him in the quiet of dusk on the balcony of their Islamabad home.
He wanted to talk philosophy as much as politics, and liked this time when the day was turning into night. The conversations would often end on a similar note: change; defeat corruption; become prime minister whatever happened.
By the time he was preparing for this last attempt to take power he recognised his time was coming. “People feel the other parties are bankrupt. The country has changed course, it is a failed state, there is alarm in Pakistan which is why my party has grown the way it has.”
His opponents may quibble about