Doomed romance of Diana retold

A new book claims to tell the story of the Princess of Wales' love affair with the surgeon who broke her heart. MICHELE HEWITSON explains.


May 1997, Lahore, Pakistan. In a walled garden, under the banana palms and fragrant jasmine blossoms, a family group is having a tea party for an honoured guest. She is dressed in the traditional Pakistani shalwar kameez, but she is blond-haired, blue-eyed. "The Princess takes tea, but avoids eating anything. She enchants the whole family but she is focusing her efforts on the one woman she feels she must impress if she is to marry the man of her dreams. [The Princess] knows how important it is to get the mother on her side."

The princess is the late Diana. She is described here flaunting her famous charms on a worthwhile target: a prospective mother-in-law.

Diana: Her Last Love by Kate Snell (Granada, $49.95) purports to be the last word on Diana's love affair with the Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan - it's his mother in that tea-party scene.

Why, now, almost three years after the death of Diana, would we want to peer into that private walled garden?

History compels us, apparently. Where were you, asks the author, when the news came through of Diana's death? "Friends of the Princess say it was like being in a Dali painting; everything felt very surreal." (The furniture was weeping?)

The author was on her honeymoon in Bali, where, she claims, "old women in the middle of rice fields were sobbing ... They felt, as did the rest of the world, that Diana belonged to them." This is by way of a disingenuous excuse for writing a book which, with the help of Khan's family, "helped me walk the fine line between invasion of privacy, and understanding certain events that were to fundamentally shape Diana's life and help us gain a unique insight into her thoughts and feelings."

How deep an insight does the latest contribution to the Di industry provide?

Let's start with the obvious question: why would the world's most glamorous woman, a woman obsessed with gowns and gyms, fall for an unknown Pakistani surgeon who shuns publicity, dresses badly and "eats fatty foods, smokes too much and drinks too much"?

All right, Charles was no oil painting either - but he did happen to be the man who would be King. Di's astrologer, Debbie Frank, has a scientific theory: "They had a lot in common, dealing with life and death. Heart surgery is a very important thing, and the doctor is almost omnipotent in those circumstances, and they have a lot of power to make somebody live.

"Diana's own heart was broken; Khan seemed to be the perfect person to heal her and to encourage her interest in helping other people to heal."

Except for one little problem: Khan broke off the relationship. He wanted to marry Diana, Snell believes, but he didn't want to marry her celebrity, and it was almost certain that his family would be less than ecstatic about the idea of his marriage to a non-Muslim Englishwoman with a reputation for highly publicised flings.

At the end of July 1997, Khan had decided to call it quits. Diana, according to Snell, "was not about to take the rejection lying down."

Insightful? You might not want to go there. Because, to put it coarsely, Snell reveals that in fact Diana did take the rejection lying down: next to Dodi Fayed on his luxury yacht where she was snapped in those now infamous photographs titled "The Kiss."

Nothing new in that, but Snell claims to have uncovered "a fact that has never been revealed before." Diana, she says, was all too well aware that a paparazzo was present; indeed, Snell speculates, Diana orchestrated a tip-off which was set up to give the appearance of a chase. The photographer involved had received enough accurate information on the whereabouts of the launch to make tracking it down child's play; he had also been given to understand that there wouldn't be any complaints about the presence of a long camera lens on a supposedly secret, romantic jaunt.

"Whoever was controlling events was an arch manipulator," comments Snell. And "whoever" was employing well-honed skills in a game she was adept at playing.

"Any self-respecting Mills and Boon reader knows that to win her man back, the heroine must make him jealous, and jealousy was certainly a weapon in Diana's armoury that she had used before."

But this is not a kiss-and-tell story, Snell assures us - which is shorthand for "Khan did not directly cooperate with the writing of this book."

An alternative title might be, Diana: The Last Betrayal of a Not Very Interesting Woman. If only.