In episode seven of The Crown series five, Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) is shown comforting a worried friend who’s husband is in hospital having surgery. But then something – someone, rather – catches her eye: a heart doctor. “Quite dishy, isn’t he?” before reeling off a list of his physical attributes, while the friend stays silent. Read the room, Diana!
That doctor is Hasnat Khan, the man Diana had her first public relationship with following her separation from Prince Charles, and who she once dubbed “Mr Wonderful”. But who is Khan and what happened in their two-year romance?
Queen of hearts meets the heart doctor
Diana, as in The Crown, was first introduced to Khan in 1995 at the Royal Brompton Hospital, while a friend was having heart surgery. In an inquest following Diana’s death in 1997, Khan gave a full account of their relationship, and noted that when they first met, Diana had been "down to earth" and "very flirtatious with everyone".
According to the BBC: “He described one occasion when the couple were in a pub and Diana had wanted to order drinks at the bar because it was something she had never done.”
The relationship was largely kept undercover, with Khan staying at Diana’s home, Kensington Palace, as well as Diana making overnight visits to Khan’s central London home. Khan met Diana’s sons, the princes William and Harry, as the romance progressed. Other unsubstantiated stories also came out, like these in the Daily Telegraph: “He was smuggled in and out of Kensington Palace in the boot of a car; she once wore a long, dark wig so she could go with him to Ronnie Scott's jazz club in Soho; and how they had enjoyed a drink in the Prince of Wales pub in Middlesex.”
The relationship was going from strength to strength, and Khan, who hails from Pakistan, even took Diana to meet his family in Pakistan in 1996. The princess wore a traditional shalwar kameez as a nod to his Muslim faith, and Khan told the Sunday Telegraph that things went well with Diana and her would-be in-laws: “She really enjoyed her time when she came here. She also enjoyed the afternoon tea she had with my family. And I think she very much liked the Asian family's eccentric culture.”
Paul Burrell, Diana’s former butler, revealed the intensity of their romance: “The princess said that this was her soulmate, this was the man she loved more than any other and it was a very deep, spiritual relationship. I witnessed it at first hand and they were very much in love.”
In Khan’s statement to the inquest, he revealed that the couple had talked about marriage, and Diana even considered a move to Pakistan to be with him. As per the BBC: “Khan said he would not be able to live a normal life and, if they ever had children together, he would never be able to take them anywhere. The only way they could live anything near a normal life would be to move to his home country of Pakistan, where the press did not bother people, he told Diana.”
Diana even talked to Jemima Khan, then married to cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, about making the move to the country. But later, Khan added: “I got the impression she did not consider living in Pakistan there a possibility.”
Something changed in the early summer of 1997 for the couple, as Khan felt that after Diana came back from holiday with Mohamed Al-Fayed and his son, Dodi, she was “not her normal self” and he had suspicions she had met someone else.
In the inquest, one of Diana’s friends, Rosa Monckton, claimed that Khan had broken up with Diana, leaving her “deeply upset and hurt”: “She was very much in love with him. She hoped that they would be able to have a future together. She wanted to marry him.” She added that when she had been on holiday just two weeks prior to her death, Diana spent far more time talking about Khan than Dodi Fayed: “It was clear to me she was really missing Hasnat and I think Dodi was a distraction from the hurt she felt from the break-up.”
Khan’s father, Abdul Rasheed Khan, said that his son had told the family of the split: “If I married her [Diana], our marriage would not last for more than a year. We are culturally so different from each other. She is from Venus and I am from Mars. If it ever happened, it would be like a marriage from two different planets.”
Diana died in a car crash in Paris in August 1997, and Khan married his second wife, Somi Sohail in 2017.
The Crown series five is streaming on Netflix now.
