Why the princess and her Mr Right were denied their happily-ever-after

 

Princess Diana was head over heels for heart surgeon Hasnat Khan and wanted to marry him. Now, 12 years after her death, he's finally revealed why their affair was doomed.

The Pakistani doctor, who slipped back into Britain in January after a self-imposed exile, confessed to friends recently that they would have had to live quietly in his country as man and wife. He says that - like her friend Jemima Goldsmith, who married politician Imran Khan - Diana wouldn't have felt at home.

'It was obvious that I could not have fitted into her life in London and she could not have fitted into mine,' he told friends. 'If we'd lived in Pakistan, it would have been just as difficult. She'd have wanted to come back regularly to see Harry and William. She was afraid of being portrayed as an absentee mother.'

Hasnat met Diana at a London hospital in 1995 and they carried on a steamy affair for two years. At the time he said, 'She's a nice person, charming... We are all vulnerable and fragile sometimes.'

Hasnat says Diana loved him so much she studied Islam and hoped they could live happily ever after abroad. But he was unaware she was also seeing Dodi Al-Fayed, saying, 'I have no reason to think Diana was unfaithful to me.'

The doctor was often smuggled into Kensington Palace in the boot of butler Paul Burrell's car for secret trysts with Diana. He told the 2007 inquest into her death that their sex life was 'normal' and she was on the Pill. 

To avoid the public glare surrounding the tribunal, Hasnat returned to Pakistan shortly after he married an Afghan nobleman's daughter in an arranged marriage in 2006.

But the union was not destined to last. Hasnat is now aged 49, living in a small London flat and working as part of Basildon Hospital's expert heart-lung team. Sadly, however, he's still suffering from his own broken heart.

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