Dr Hasnat Khan, the one Lady Diana really loved
After twelve years of silence, the 62-year-old surgeon spoke in the columns of the Daily Mail on Friday, January 8, about his romance with the Princess of Wales and the shock interview given by the latter to the BBC, in 1995. The opportunity to come back to the passionate romance of a discreet couple.
There was a time Lady Diana's lover. Since then, Hasnat Khan has sunk into oblivion. At least he preferred to be forgotten. After twelve years of silence, the 62-year-old surgeon has yet left his reserve. He spoke in the columns of the Daily Mail on Friday, January 8, on the accusations of manipulation leveled against journalist Martin Bashir. The reporter had conducted the shocking interview the princess gave to the BBC in November 1995. “I felt it was a big mistake and I told Diana it was awful, but I added: "If you were on a mission, you accomplished it," "Hasnat Khan recalled.
Twenty-five years after the interview, Charles Spencer, the princess's brother, accused Martin Bashir of showing him false account statements, supposedly proving that some close to Lady Diana were paid to divulge information to the Secret Service. These allegations did not surprise Hasnat Khan, put off by his meeting with the journalist in January 1996. “Almost from the start he asked me very direct and personal questions about Diana and our relationship. remembered this British doctor of Pakistani origin. Why we weren't married, when we were going to have the ceremony, that sort of thing. They were intimate questions. ”
The meeting of "Mr. Merveilleux"
At the time, the doctor and the princess had only known each other for a few months. “We met on August 27 (1995, Editor's note), relates Hasnat Khan. It was a bank holiday Monday and she was coming to visit one of my patients. ” Separated from Prince Charles since 1992 and in the process of divorce, Lady Diana indeed goes to the bedside of her friend Joseph Toffolo, who has just undergone a heart operation at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London. She is in the waiting room with Oonagh, the latter's wife, when Hasnat Khan arrives. The latter greets her, little intimidated by her presence. “I doubt that in all of her adult life, Diana, the Princess of Wales, made less of an impression on anyone!” Oonagh Toffolo recalled in the Mirror.
The same cannot be said of the main interested party. "Oonagh, isn't he sublime?" Lady Diana reportedly said after meeting the surgeon. The princess would then have gone to the hospital daily for three weeks. Officially, to inquire about the state of health of Joe Toffolo. Unofficially, in order to cross paths with Hasnat Khan, with whom she quickly becomes friends. "I think I met my Mr. Wonderful", she would have slipped to Simone Simmons, her "healer", after finding herself alone with the surgeon in an elevator.
A discreet romance
Two weeks later, the doctor and the ex-wife of Prince Charles agree on a first appointment. “One day, we passed each other when we were leaving the hospital,” Hasnat Khan told the Daily Mail. She shouted at me, "Hey, where are you going?" I replied that I was going to my uncle's home in Stratford-upon-Avon to pick up books, and I cried out, "Do you want to come?" She said yes." Before adding: “We drove there, and we felt this wonderful connection. He was an ordinary person, in many ways, a normal and very warm person. ” Their relationship then takes a new turn. For two years, Lady Diana and Hasnat Khan meet in private, at Kensington Palace, or in the doctor's small apartment in Chelsea, which the princess is working to clean up from top to bottom. In his arms, she forgets her life as a fallen princess.
Their watchword? Discretion. When they go out as a duo - including going to jazz concerts at the Ronnie Scott Club in Soho late in the evening - Lady Diana sports a black wig and sunglasses. It is different at the hospital, where the mother of princes Harry and William enjoys interacting with her companion's patients. "She knew very well how to identify people," says the doctor today. When meeting my patients and their families, she naturally showed empathy. It was actually so instinctive that I nicknamed her "the witch". She loved it. ” In May 1996, Lady Diana met the family of Hasnat Khan in Lahore, Pakistan. He also made the acquaintance of his sons, Princes Harry and William.
"Hasnat will never betray me"
When a conflict arises, the 35-year-old princess sends her butler, Paul Burrell, to chat with the surgeon in his stead, and an appointment is made at a Chelsea pub. But, over time, these dissensions grow. First, Hasnat Khan refuses to marry, to the chagrin of the soon-to-be divorced princess. The latter would even have asked Paul Burrell to find someone to unite them in secret. "I thought it was a ridiculous idea," Hasnat Khan told police after Lady Diana's death on August 31, 1997.
“Do you honestly think you can just bring a priest here and get married?” He would have said. The surgeon begins, moreover, to fear the intrusions of the tabloids in his private life. "The press has found my old girlfriends, my medical university and my former teachers," he told the authorities. So much so that the couple are considering a radical solution. “I told him the only way for us to have any semblance of a normal life would be to live in Pakistan, because the press doesn't bother you there,” recalls Hasnat Khan. An option that Lady Diana would have seriously considered.
But the incompatible schedules of the two lovers, the reluctance of the surgeon to get married and the media intrusions would have got the better of their romance. Their relationship ended in July 1997, when Lady Diana joined heir Dodi Al-Fayed on his yacht in Saint-Tropez. A month later, the princess and the billionaire lose their lives in a chase with the paparazzi. Since then, Hasnat Khan has kept a low profile. The doctor, who only married in 2006, to Hadia Sher Ali, a descendant of Afghan royalty, before divorcing in 2008 and remarrying an anonymous woman, still refuses to write a book focusing on her relationship with Princess. "Everyone betrays me," thus confided the princess to a friend, the summer of her death. Hasnat will never betray me. ” Time seems to prove him right.
