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Imran Khan circa 1990 Getty Images
Cricket-star-turned-politician Imran Khan, the former playboy who counted Princess Diana as a close friend, is poised to become Pakistan’s next prime minister.
“We’re going to run the country like it’s never been run before,” he declared ahead of Saturday’s early election results.
Khan, 65, played off his status as a legend of Pakistan’s favorite sport: he was the captain of the national cricket team that defeated England in the World Cup final in 1992.
Back then, he was known as a playboy who chased supermodels around London nightclubs and posed lounging on a bed in nothing but a pair of satin shorts.
He palled around with Sting, Mick Jagger and Goldie Hawn. Princess Di paid Khan a visit in Pakistan in 1997 – and even enlisted him in an effort to try to talk on-again, off-again boyfriend Hasnat Ahmad Khan (no relation to the pol) into marrying her before her sudden death in a Paris car crash.
By then, Khan himself was married to British heiress Jemima Goldsmith, a London filmmaker, socialite and gossip-column regular. They had two children together, but divorced in 2004 after nine years of marriage.
After a months-long marriage to glamorous British-Pakistani journalist Reham Nayyar in 2015, he made headlines in early 2018 when he wedded his spiritual adviser, Bushra Wattoo, in a traditional Islamic ceremony during which the bride was shrouded head-to-toe in veils.
Khan’s political views mirrored changes in his romantic life over the past two decades.
He ventured into politics in 1996 when he launched a party that won only a single seat in the National Assembly that year – his own.
Few took him seriously as a politician. Critics dubbed him “Im the Dim.”
Princess Diana and Imran Khan
Princess Diana and Imran KhanGetty Images
But after the Sept. 11 attacks, he seized on Pakistani opposition to the US war on terror. Latching on to rising anti-American sentiment, he accused the West of conflating Islam and terrorism. Khan defended the Taliban’s justice system and increasingly portrayed himself as a pious Muslim.
He has defended Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws, which imprison members of minority faiths, and his party has denounced Malala Yousafzai, the schoolgirl shot by the Taliban, as a CIA agent.
Khan’s vision of a “new Pakistan” struck a chord among middle-class voters sick of high inflation, constant threats of violence and growing national debt. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has cut hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid.
Khan’s upstart Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party took 115 of 270 seats in the National Assembly, officials announced Saturday, in an election marred by a deadly suicide bombing and accusations of vote tampering. The party’s total is 21 short of a majority, but Khan declared victory nonetheless, planning to team up with regional party representatives to form a governing coalition.
He has pledged to end decades of misrule in a country whose corrupt politics are, he said, “eating away this country like a cancer.”
Opponents claim that his newfound piety is a hypocritical attempt to gain power. His second wife, in a recent memoir, contended that his religiosity is merely “a front.”
Expert observers suspect his election victory was a soft coup engineered by Pakistan’s powerful military.
With Khan as the popular face of the regime, they say, the generals will be able to quietly pull the strings – without taking
any responsibility if things go wrong.
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