At the end of August of 1997, Diana died in Paris. Photographers chased the car, and Dodi Fayed died alongside her in it, which turned every warning Khan had given her over 2 years into a coroner’s problem. The pursuit he kept describing had just killed her. The 6th of September, 1997, at Westminster Abbey. Khan arrived alone, wore dark sunglasses, sat among the congregation, and sought no attention from anyone.
In the weeks that followed, he turned down every tabloid cheque put in front of him, and returned to the operating theatre to carry on doing bypasses in London, while the country outside mourned her on television. Seven years of silence. Then, in 2004, he sat down with Lord Stevens’ Operation Paget investigators and gave a full on-the-record account, not to sell anything, but because a police inquiry needed his testimony to knock down a conspiracy theory that was eating the facts alive.
The document at the centre of this story is Khan’s witness statement to the Metropolitan Police, dated the 24th of September, 2004. Almost everything we can call documented about this relationship comes from it, and almost everything repeated about this relationship on television comes from somewhere else entirely. Mind that gap.
By the time the inquest convened at the Royal Courts of Justice in 2008, Khan lived outside British jurisdiction, and he used his legal right to refuse a compulsory appearance as a witness. His explanation, given to the press in January of 2008, reads less like evasion and more like exhaustion:
“Sometimes,” he told a reporter, “I feel like screaming because I have moved on and it keeps coming back.”
A barrister read the 2004 statement aloud in open court on the 3rd of March 2008, entering his full testimony into the public record in his absence. One more thing that statement did, and it has nothing to do with romance, Mohamed Al-Fayed spent years alleging that Diana died pregnant and that the pregnancy explained a murder plot.
Khan, in a position to know, testified that Diana was very particular about taking her contraceptive pills throughout their two years together, which is a sentence he delivered to police officers about a woman he had loved. In 2006, Khan entered an arranged marriage in Pakistan. The couple separated after about 18 months and finalised the divorce in 2008.
Newspapers with no business doing it dissected the breakdown at length. None of it goes in this account because he remains a living private citizen who has never sold a word of his private life to anyone. The career kept moving. He resigned his consultant post at Harefield Hospital in November of 2007 to head a cardiac hospital in Malaysia.
Later, he returned to Britain as a consultant cardiothoracic surgeon at an NHS Foundation Trust in Essex. He also directs charitable humanitarian cardiac units near the district he grew up in, where the cardiac work costs the patients nothing. He has broken his silence exactly twice and both times to correct the record about somebody else.
August of 2013, a feature film about the relationship arrived, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel with Naomi Watts as Diana, and its promotional campaign implied Khan’s tacit acceptance. He gave none. Stepping onto the record in the press, he called the film a “complete lie,” denied approving anything, and described the production as “built on hypotheses and gossip.”
Then, January of 2021, he spoke to a newspaper 24 years after her death, and he broke his silence because the popular portrayal of Diana kept drifting toward mental instability. He pushed back. She came across, in his professional assessment, as a very normal person with great qualities, plus some drawbacks and bad habits like every other human being.
In the same interview, he stated his belief that Martin Bashir had manipulated her vulnerabilities to obtain the 1995 Panorama interview, the interview Khan told her not to give. Four things remain genuinely unknown, and any account that pretends otherwise is guessing at you in a serious voice. Nobody knows the emotional mechanics of the July 1997 rupture.
Khan swore she ended it, while Monckton testified that he ended it. Whether Diana walked out before she could be rejected or whether Khan finally issued an ultimatum about public exposure sits in an evidentiary gap that no witness statement fills. Nobody knows what Dodi Fayed actually meant to her, genuine new romance or staged provocation aimed at a surgeon in London.
The only person who could settle that question died alongside him weeks after meeting him in the car the photographers chased through Paris, which is a poor way to close an argument. Nobody knows whether Diana would ever have signed the papers if Khan had proposed, if the plan had turned real, would she have relocated to Pakistan or South Africa and accepted the separation from William and Harry that every version of the plan quietly required.
Nobody ever tested that conflict because the proposal never came, and nobody knows what passed between them inside Kensington Palace between 1995 and 1997. Hours and hours of private conversation between two people in an apartment with no recording device survives now only as third-party hearsay and retrospective interpretation written down years afterwards by people repeating what they remembered.
So, did she really want to marry him? On the available sworn evidence, yes. And her named friends testified to it as well. But it never stood a chance and not because of palace conspiracies or institutional vetoes. The press pack that built her fame had turned her unmarriageable for a surgeon who needed 90 hours a week of absolute clinical focus and the relocation plan died the moment it collided with the custody of a future king.
She tried to solve that with wigs, false names, and the assurance that it would all be fine. He solved it by looking at the arithmetic and walking away.
