Some of them do not. Start with the evidence for the romantic version because it is genuinely strong. Khan himself confirmed to police that the two of them talked about marriage and looked seriously at moving abroad together to build a life. Rosa Monckton, who holidayed with Diana weeks before her death, and Lady Jemima Khan, who moved between London and Lahore and understood exactly what a Pakistani marriage would demand, both stated on the record that Diana regarded this surgeon as the love of her life and would have moved to Pakistan for him.
Paul Burrell, the royal butler, claimed she called Khan her “soulmate” and asked him to consult a Catholic priest about arranging an interfaith wedding quietly. Now, the other column of the ledger. Khan told police that neither of them ever proposed, and his words for it carry no ambiguity:
“They never actually proposed to each other.”
He explained why, and the explanation contains no romance whatsoever, only logistics. Marrying Diana would turn his life into what he flatly called “hell” because of who she was, would end any hope of a normal career, and would leave any children of theirs unable to go anywhere or do anything without a lens pointed at them.
He also confirmed that Diana initially entertained the idea of moving to Pakistan or South Africa, and then, somewhere between the enthusiasm and the logistics, changed her mind about the whole thing. That is not a woman packing. His summary of where she landed was that he got the impression she did not consider living in Pakistan a possibility.
And then, 3 weeks after she ended it, she boarded a yacht with someone else. So, the honest verdict runs like this. Partly supported because she wanted him and talked about marrying him. But nobody ever proposed. Nobody ever found the practical route to a marriage. And the man at the centre of it spent the rest of his life explaining, patiently, that the whole thing broke on obstacles unconnected to how much anybody loved anybody.
That is a better story, anyway. Rewind and go somewhere the paparazzi never bothered to look. Hasnat Ahmad Khan arrived on the 1st of April, 1958, in Jhelum, a city in the Punjab province of Pakistan, into an upper-middle-class Pashtun family. The eldest of four children. Not a peasant story. Not a palace story.
Just a solid provincial family with money, education, and opinions. His father, Rashid Khan, graduated from the London School of Economics, then returned home, and built a glassware manufacturing business. This is a family that already knew Britain, already knew what British institutions looked like from the inside, and did not need the Princess of Wales to introduce them to Kensington.
The London School of Economics is not a place you stumble into. The real authority in the household, though, belonged to his grandmother, known inside the family as Nanny Appa, who kept the traditional customs and firm views about who in this family married whom. Remember her, because she ends up drinking tea at Kensington Palace.
One more piece of family furniture. Khan is a distant relative of Imran Khan, the cricket legend and future prime minister of Pakistan, whose then wife, Jemima, happened to be one of Diana’s close friends. Convent school in Jhelum, then A levels, then King Edward Medical College in Lahore. He qualified with a medical degree in 1984, and began general medical and surgical training at Mayo Hospital in Lahore, which is where he learned medicine with his hands, at speed, on whoever came through the door.
Nobody there knew his name, either. In 1987, the Australian Medical Council selected him for cardiothoracic surgical residency in Sydney, and he worked there until 1991, by which point he could operate inside two different medical cultures on opposite sides of the planet, then London and the NHS training pathway. A doctorate from Imperial College plus a fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons, which is roughly the highest thing the British surgical system hands out to anybody.
So, by 1995, the man walking into that recovery room carried training from three continents in a job where a 2-mm error kills the patient on the table. By 1995, Khan worked as a senior cardiothoracic registrar and assistant cardiac surgeon at the Royal Brompton under the leading consultants of the day.
And his colleagues remembered a man who routinely put in 90-hour weeks. Everyone who described him reached for roughly the same vocabulary. Down-to-earth, serious about the clinical work to the point of humourlessness, and completely uninterested in high society charity galas, or anything else that required a dinner jacket and 30 minutes of conversation with a stranger holding a champagne flute.
Khan told police that press attention threatened his clinical focus and his standing as a surgeon. According to the police statement and to investigative reporting on the Brompton period, Diana returned to that hospital almost daily for 3 weeks after Toffolo’s surgery, ostensibly to support the Toffolos, and used the visits to pursue conversation and familiarity with the surgeon who ignored her.
The Princess of Wales, in the middle of the most public marital collapse in modern British history, with a media apparatus tracking her hairdresser, decided that the route to a man’s attention ran through his workplace every day for a month, and through a real interest in his job. Not a ball, not an introduction through friends, but a hospital corridor.
As she kept coming back for the Toffolos, Khan noticed something he did not expect, a real, unforced curiosity about how the hospital actually functioned, from the theatre lists down to the recovery ward. Not a photo opportunity, but questions. The one detail everybody quotes from this period comes from Simone Simmons, Diana’s energy healer, who wrote in her 2005 memoir that Diana called her the moment she left the hospital and announced the arrival of her “Mr. Wonderful.” Then talked at some length about the man’s eyes. Memorable and entirely unverified. Surviving second-hand through a memoir, the police investigation graded low for reliability. Nobody else heard it. The first date, if you can call it that, arrived in September of 1995 with all the romance of a supply run.
Khan told police that he ran into Diana on her way out of the hospital and mentioned in passing that he needed to drive up to his uncle’s house near Stratford-upon-Avon to collect some medical books. Small talk, the kind of thing you say in a doorway. She invited herself along. They drove to Warwickshire, collected the books, ate at a local restaurant, and drove back to London.
For a woman whose entire adult life ran on a schedule drawn up by other people and photographed by strangers, a spontaneous 4-hour round trip to fetch books off a shelf may well have counted as the most exotic thing available in England. She took it. Now the logistics, which ran for 2 years and required a butler. You cannot date Diana in public.
