Imran Khan: From swaggering playboy to pious politician

The music was dreadful — and the decor similar to that of a Berni Inn with the lights off — but the crowd at Tramp nightclub were so starry that it never seemed to matter much.

In its Seventies and Eighties heyday, devotees included George Best, Michael Caine, Jack Nicholson and Mick Jagger — first with wife Bianca in tow, later with Jerry Hall.

Royal patrons have included Viscount Linley and Prince Andrew, while Joan Collins had one of her wedding receptions there.

Yet probably its greatest fan was the brooding Pakistani playboy/cricketer Imran Khan, whose noble profile was often seen on the dance floor, where he would be charming one upmarket blonde or another. Indeed, he loved it so much that in Who’s Who, where others might boast a membership of White’s or the Garrick, he listed Tramp as his club.

Privately, he called it his ‘living room’, but perhaps ‘hunting ground’ would be more apposite.

It was there that, in 1986, he met heiress Sita White, daughter of Gordon (later Lord) White, who was co-founder of Hanson plc.

Almost a decade later, after being introduced to another heiress, Jemima Goldsmith, at a dinner party, he took her dancing at Tramp afterwards.

It is hard to reconcile the swaggering playboy image of London society’s premier ladykiller with the politician that Khan, 65, has become.

On the brink last night of being elected as Pakistan’s new prime minister, he recently married his third wife, a burka-wearing Islamic mystic whose face he had never seen before their wedding.

Imran Khan’s personal and political journey began when he, the only son of a wealthy civil engineer, arrived from Pakistan as a teenager and talented cricketer who attended Royal Grammar School Worcester.

Having recently wed for the third time to Bushra Maneka, a leading Sufi [Islamic mystic] scholar, Khan has seemingly put his playboy days behind him, having previously been married to Jemima Goldsmith (right) and Reham Khan (left)

He went on to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Keble College, Oxford, gaining a third-class degree, and making his Test cricket debut.

By the early Eighties, he was playing for Sussex and captaining Pakistan and had fallen in love with London’s raffish party culture. Home was a Knightsbridge flat that boasted a mirrored dining room and canopied bedroom with a painted tiger on the wall.

One visitor called it: ‘A bedroom of great expectations.’ Certainly, young women found his intense hooded gaze and shaggy, rock star locks irresistible.

Khan’s female friends included girls-about-town such as Susannah Constantine (who had dated Princess Margaret’s son Viscount Linley), Lady Liza Campbell and society artist Emma Sergeant.

‘I never thought I was good- looking, ever,’ he once said. Half of London would have disagreed.

As his friend, the model Marie Helvin sighed: ‘Everyone falls for Imran. He has a scent that is very attractive to women.’

A regular in gossip columns, always linked to some new beauty, Khan was defiant about his lifestyle, telling a 1984 interviewer: ‘In Pakistan you just don’t meet single girls. There are no discos, no bars, no meeting places.’

Meeting women was among ‘the very decadent pleasures in life which I enjoy,’ he added.

Khan married again, to Bushra Maneka, a leading Sufi [Islamic mystic] scholar, divorcee and mother of five. He had sought spiritual guidance from her some three years previously when she was still married

But by 1992, the year in which he retired from cricket, he started to ditch his playboy image, telling another interviewer — apparently with a straight face: ‘I’m not a womaniser. People just say that because I’m a single man.’

The fact that his on-off lover Sita White bore him a daughter, Tyrian, that same year, was first ignored and then denied. (In 1997, a court ruled that Khan was her father.)

Instead, he emphasised his great respect for Muslim culture. Cynics might say it was at this point he started to believe it was his destiny to lead Pakistan — in which case the Tramp years had to be disavowed.

His first semi-political act was to begin fundraising for a cancer hospital in memory of his late mother, which opened in 1994. He said he had rediscovered his faith, and now prayed daily.

Not surprisingly, many were astonished when it emerged soon after that he had proposed marriage — on their second date — to Jemima Goldsmith. Raised as a Christian, she has Jewish background via her father, the late billionaire Sir James Goldsmith.

Khan was 42 to her 20 and they met when she was on a break from her studies at Bristol University.

Within a few weeks in 1995 they had married — she converted to Islam, learned Urdu and moved to Islamabad.

The news was a sensation — as indeed were photos that emerged of the couple making love on the poolside while on holiday in Majorca. As a favour to the Goldsmith family, the editor of Hello! Magazine bought them up and they were never published.

In 1996, having undergone a reassessment of his life and priorities, he founded his political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf.By the time of the country’s 1997 elections, Jemima had given birth to her first son, Sulaiman Isa Khan, and was living in a compound in Lahore with Imran’s extended family.

There was no washing machine and she was said to find the food so repellent that she was existing on chocolate bars.

Jemima was presented to her husband’s countrymen at a rally in Peshawar, and made a speech in Urdu, asking women to vote in the elections. Witnesses said her legs trembled throughout.

The party did not win a single seat in that election, and only one in 2004. It was becoming clear that the very fact that Imran Khan had married a woman of Jewish extraction was to be used against him.

‘In the beginning, the idea was that we would campaign together,’ he said. ‘But I had to pull her out of politics to shield her from it. That is when our problems began because we were spending time apart. That then exacerbated the problems of a cross-cultural marriage and she inevitably missed her friends, family and home more than she might have.’

Jemima, who had another son, Qasim in 1999, began making trips to London to finish the degree she’d started at Bristol.

She then decided to do a Masters in Middle East politics, which again meant spending time in London. Relieved to be free of the constraints of her life as a political wife, Jemima also needed to physically recover from the continuous attacks of gastroenteritis which plagued her in Pakistan.

With Imran spending three weeks of each month away from home, engaged in politics and charity fundraising, she had become demoralised and lonely.

For the final two years of the marriage, Jemima was based in England, and in 2004 they called time on the union.

‘I think she gave up,’ Khan mused. ‘She thought it was a never-ending struggle and she didn’t believe I would make it.’

Nonetheless, they remain close, and Jemima is guardian to Khan’s daughter with Sita White, Tyrian.

In 2005, when her romance with Hugh Grant hit a rocky patch, there was even a suggestion by family friends that Jemima might even go back to Imran because they ‘still loved each other very much’.

He has always been closely involved with their sons, who would visit him in the holidays, and in the UK he tends to stay with Jemima’s mother, Lady Annabel Goldsmith.

The rumours that they might reconcile was firmly scotched when Imran married the journalist and former BBC weather girl, Reham Khan, in January 2015. Their disastrous union lasted just ten months.

Reham, a divorced mother of three, met Imran in 2012 after she moved to Pakistan and interviewed him for a television news channel. After a second interview, he invited her to dinner, she said, telling her he had something important to discuss — and then proposed marriage.

Astonished, Reham accepted, but her disillusionment was swift. She claimed that he was so spoiled he did not know how to use a microwave oven or a cashpoint.

‘He’s the only celebrity we have in Pakistan and expects everyone to do everything. I told him: “You’re like Rapunzel in the tower — you have no connection to real life.”

‘He’s so narcissistic and single-minded about his goal [of becoming prime minister] that he forgets the appropriate emotional response to things. He thinks he’s God. I married him because I believed in him and his mission.’

In a self-published memoir, she sensationally claims that Imran has fathered five children out of wedlock — something his advisers strenuously deny. Imran’s friends say her book is nothing more than ‘the ravings of an embittered ex’.

The end of the marriage came after Imran apparently told her not to attend a political rally.

It was reported that she had hit him across the back of the head with an open hand during a disagreement over her political role.

Reham was notified of their Islamic divorce — talaq — by text and email seven days later. One friend of Khan’s observed: ‘He thought he was getting Jackie Kennedy, but instead ended up with Hillary Clinton.’

In February, Khan married again, to Bushra Maneka, a leading Sufi [Islamic mystic] scholar, divorcee and mother of five. He had sought spiritual guidance from her some three years previously when she was still married.

Because Maneka, 39, wears a veil in front of men other than her husband, Khan did not see her face until after their wedding — although he had seen a photograph of her as a young woman.

‘I did not catch a glimpse of my wife’s face until after we were married . . . I was not disappointed, and now am happily married,’ he said, adding: ‘I have gradually realised that although I know more about physical attraction, the mind and intellect are much more important than the physical. I have great respect for my wife’s intellect and character.’

Indeed, they are qualities Imran Khan may well need to draw on if his long-cherished dream of leading his country becomes reality.