After just 10 months, Reham Khan’s marriage to the cricket hero and politician is over. Was it his aides, the media or black magic that destroyed their chances? Rosie Kinchen presses her for the answer
A fortnight after Reham and Imran Khan’s marriage has broken down, in a whirl of speculation about control-freakery and dogs being evicted from the marital chamber, she walks into the lobby of the Charlotte Street Hotel in central London in an outfit as white as snow.
If they are in a post-divorce PR battle, this is impressive tactical dressing. Her marriage to Pakistan’s most famous man has been a “painful” and “disturbing experience” during which she has been accused of “hitting” him, “poisoning him with rat poison” and being an “MI6 spy”.
She has been the victim of a “witch-hunt” she cries. It has been an example of “here is a woman”, let’s “demonise her”, “vilify her” and “burn her at the stake”. She is giving this, her only interview, because she says no one else has come forward and defended her against these claims.
Khan is tiny and childlike, peering out from under her white headscarf with dark, wounded eyes. Reports that Imran divorced her by texting the word “talaq” three times — an Islamic divorce — are wrong, she says. They agreed to part last month before she left Pakistan, but she has been devastated by the way it has “played out” since.
First the announcement was leaked; then she was “presented with divorce papers” by one of her husband’s representatives in the UK; and now her belongings have been “packed off to some storage facility” within two days of the break-up. Her eyes open wide: “There is no need for that.”
Given all of this, you might expect to find a woman in a vengeful fury but Khan’s position is a complicated one. She is planning to resume her media career in Pakistan, where her ex- husband enjoys the status of a demigod. She claims she wants to do this, but the truth is she has little choice.
“The sad fact is that despite all my work with women’s rights, my marriage wasn’t registered in Pakistan or in the UK, so actually I have no rights and, after a 10-month marriage, you’re not entitled to anything,” she says with a hollow laugh.
She is “hurt” that no one in Khan’s camp has defended her against accusations of gold-digging: “I asked them to release a statement to confirm that there has been no money, there has been no suggestion of it and there doesn’t seem to be any intention of giving any.”
All she has had in reply is silence. To me the strangest thing about the marriage is that either of them had thought it was a good idea in the first place. Their courtship sounds about as romantic as a long game of Connect Four.
Reham Khan, a divorced mother of three, left a job on regional BBC news and moved back to Pakistan in 2013. As the host of a television programme she interviewed Imran Khan, a former cricketer and playboy and the leader of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, the country’s second biggest party by popular vote, “two or three times”. But because of the “cultural setup” in Pakistan they “wouldn’t speak” to each other before or after the interview.
Because she is “not your average Pakistani woman” and has never felt obliged “to do all of this smiling at work”, she decided to complain to him about a member of his political party who had been sending “inappropriate text messages”. Khan was impressed and sent her a text saying, “I need your parents’ names”, which she thought was “a bit odd”.
He wanted to give them to his “spiritual adviser to find out if you’re the right woman”. She told him off for his lack of romance and said: “This isn’t how it’s done.”
The next time they met, he proposed. Although they “had never met socially” and “didn’t really know one another”, she found it “endearing” and agreed to marry him.
None of which makes him sound terribly smooth. “No, he’s not very romantic,” she smiles. “He never gave me anything, not even a wedding band. It’s not cultural. That’s absolutely fine of course.” A tiny tinkling of laugh.
If anything, she seems to have felt sorry for him. It didn’t seem to Reham that he had many close friends: “I think he has led a very isolated life.”
The first trouble came from his family. Khan’s elder sisters, she claimed, made it clear they were against the match, that she “wasn’t good enough” for their brother. Rumoured reasons for this included her divorce — from the psychiatrist Dr Ijaz Rehman — and photographs of her in a short dress.
Is that true? “You have to ask them,” she says primly, then adds, with only the tiniest pause, “actually my brother didn’t think Imran was religious enough for me. I had to persuade him.”
Khan convinced her that once they were married, the attacks would stop. So they did and Reham and her youngest daughter moved into his mansion in Bani Gala, on a hilltop overlooking Islamabad. Almost instantly she felt stifled. Party members made it clear that they had “issues with me working”, she says.
“I was told specifically by a senior adviser: they basically wanted me to be in the kitchen, to be cooking chapatis and not to be seen ever again.”
Did her husband stand up for her?
“I think when there are senior advisers who have your best interests at heart, you tend to listen to them,” she says cautiously. Why marry a woman with a career? Another tinkling laugh: “I have wondered about that quite a few times now. You’d have to ask him.”
She gave up her television show to avoid a conflict of interest and didn’t work for several months. But she still upset the party early on when a journalist questioned her about problems in her first marriage. Asked in an interview if she had been the victim of domestic abuse, she “didn’t want to lie” and said yes.
“I answered as diplomatically as I could, being a politician’s wife,” she says. But the media storm that followed upset the party. Her ex-husband — who has always denied the allegations — told an interviewer that she had “used him like toilet paper”. Imran’s response was silence.
“I was told not to defend myself, to let it die down,” she says. But the “attacks escalated”. Although Imran knew about her past, she thinks it took its toll on him: “I don’t know if he was surprised by it, but he was affected by it.”
Meanwhile, she was making some changes at home. Did she rearrange his house, shut out his family and kick his dogs out of the marital bedroom, as has been suggested? “If rearranging the house means cleaning the fridge and providing food!” she cries, aghast. “It was a bachelor fridge, it was a bachelor pad and there was no food.”
The dogs — he has a sheepdog cross and she has a belgian shepherd — still slept in the bedroom. “My whole day revolved around the dogs,” she sighs. “His dog was in love with me.”
She did make some “small” changes, she nods, not least to his wardrobe which was “in a dreadful condition” and “moth-eaten” when she moved in. “He was quite capable of walking off without noticing,” she says. “I’m the sort of person who panics if my family is not looking right.”
So she “marched off” with one of his private secretaries and used him as a dummy to buy a new wardrobe. Imran was “quite happy with it”, she purrs. She introduced other things such as “deodorants, creams and shampoos”. And she tried to make sure he was given cooked food, because “he was eating raw porridge when I got there”.
There was no housekeeper; just a “kitchen boy” and a caretaker “who really wanted to be on TV”, so guests were never fed and Imran was surviving on “one chapati a day”.
He was not, she thinks, quite prepared for married bliss. “For someone who has been on their own for 54 years, a man who’s been a bachelor all his life, whose first marriage [to Jemima Goldsmith] was after he turned 40, it’s very hard to change. It’s very hard to settle into domestic life,” she says.
“I tried to talk to him. I’m very talkative and I’m very chatty but, you know, you can’t exactly with Imran Khan. You can’t discuss the colour of the curtains; you can only talk politics. You cannot exactly discuss Bollywood films with him. God knows I tried.”
Was he a good stepfather? She wrinkles her nose. “He didn’t interfere at all. He’s not the sort of person who gets involved with anyone. He’s very private and he’s not used to having children around.” Contrary to reports that her children had taken over the house, they preferred to cram into one room. “They would never come out . . . would never go to the kitchen”, while Imran had his own wing.
Press reports of jealousy between her and Goldsmith have also been greatly exaggerated, she said. A close relationship between a father and the mother of his two sons “is inevitable”, she says. “If anything I encouraged him to spend more time with his children: he’s lazy with phone calls and I thought that was a bit odd.”
Her career was a constant problem, particularly when she became an “ambassador for street children” in Peshawar. Many party supporters were said to fear that she wanted to “ride his coat-tails”. She admits: “There wasn’t any involvement, I never attended meetings or anything of the sort, but obviously there was insecurity.”
When she and Imran argued, it was “mainly because I would get frustrated about everyone having a go at me”. There had been a period of relative calm “for two or three months”, but last month it all came to a head: “We had a big argument and I decided that was it.”
About what? She pulls the headscarf back over her hair: “Something happened that I found difficult to get past.”
I keep asking what exactly happened. A sigh and a pause: “It’s personal.” I’m not sure what to make of this row. It comes up several times and every time my questions are blocked with a hurt look, a deep sigh. She wants me to know but she won’t say any more.
She now believes she may have been the victim of a plot. In September news of a divorce first broke in the Pakistani press. “It was news to us because we were on holiday,” she says. “I asked: where are they getting this from?” Khan told her to relax. “He said they used to do this about him and Jemima every few months. But it seems to me now that everybody was expecting it and everybody knew.”
In the weeks before their row she found “things emerging in the house”, she says; “small amulets”. She didn’t know what they were, but the servants said she shouldn’t be touching them. She has been tweeting about black magic and this is what she was referring to: “In the Koran it’s mentioned that there is magic and it is used for only one reason — in the Babylonian tradition as well — to separate husband and wife.” Where were the objects coming from? “Not from me.” Does she think he has planned it all? “Let’s just say I think he knew more than I did.”
They had, she says, never “developed a bond of trust”, perhaps because “we’re too old to be in a relationship, maybe too set in our ways”.
She is furious with the way she has been treated by media here and in Pakistan: “Both of us are divorced, but it seems [from the media] that I’m the only one. We’ve now both been divorced twice, but no one says that.”
In Britain she feels she has been put down by the press. “To be referred to as a weather girl — I am a 42-year-old mother of three; I have worked very hard; I have worked two jobs most of the time to raise children. To demean someone like that, isn’t that very sexist?” she asks.
She plans to continue her work with street children in Pakistan, is producing two films and has rushed to our interview from trying to secure new work.
“I have to make up for loss of income. I married a man who convinced me that he loved me, who looked lonely and who I thought had the same ideas about life and the same goals, but we were just too different,” she sighs.
“Maybe I wasn’t meant to have everything — personal happiness doesn’t seem to be on the cards.” And she gives me a sad, saintly smile.
This article appeared on Reham Khan’s blog https://rehamkhanonline.wordpress.com
