From a playboy cricket celebrity with a British socialite wife to a conservative populist dubbed “Taliban Khan” by opponents for his flirtation with extreme views, Imran Khan’s life has traced an arc stranger and more colourful than most films.
He reached the top of sporting and political life, guiding Pakistan to its only Cricket World Cup win in his first career, and then defied mocking journalists and dismissive political veterans to make his upstart party a major force and to ultimately become prime minister.
Pakistan’s powerful military is widely credited with swinging the contested 2018 election in his favour, and later masterminding his fall after he tried to take control of senior military appointments and began railing against the armed forces’ influence in politics.
Khan’s downfall has been fast. Ousted from office last April by a no-confidence vote that briefly united his political opponents, in November a gunman opened fire on his convoy at a rally, injuring his leg in what aides say was an assassination attempt.
Now he has been sentenced to three years in jail, and barred from politics for five years, on corruption charges. At 70, the ruling could be the final nail in his political coffin, but Khan has vowed to fight on, promising to appeal and calling on his supporters to take to the streets.
He remains hugely popular, and for years channelled underdog energy to secure sporting and political triumph, so he is on familiar territory urging a fightback. At the 1992 Cricket World Cup, he was captain of a team that won only one of their first five games. He asked his men to play like “cornered tigers”, embodied that spirit in a tiger T-shirt he wore like a talisman, and they fought their way to the top.
Khan retired after that triumph, and briefly became a philanthropist, raising millions to found a cancer hospital in memory of his mother that still offers free treatment. Then in 1996, he launched a political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) – the Pakistan Movement for Justice – a decision he later claimed was inspired by time spent in England as a young student and cricketer. Khan said he admired the welfare state and rule of law and wanted Pakistan to have both.
He spent 16 years in the wilderness, winning only a single parliamentary seat for himself and often being treated as a figure of fun by an elite that for decades has revolved around two dynasties. But in 2013 elections his party made sweeping gains, turning Khan into a significant power broker.
He was buoyed in that long political journey by supreme self-confidence, born of his sporting talent and striking good looks, bolstered by a privileged childhood.
He recently told New Yorker magazine that he was “more evolved” than other people, and in the 1990s compared his experience as a political outsider to that of the prophet Muhammad, who also was spurned in his early years of proselytisation.
Born in Lahore in 1952, he had four sisters but was the only son of a civil engineer from a wealthy family with roots along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Educated at Lahore’s Aitchison College, often seen as the Eton of Pakistan, he went on to the Royal Grammar School in Worcester, then Oxford University.
In 1971, still a shy teenager, he made his Test debut against England and in a decade would become the captain of his national team. He is still considered one of cricket’s all-time greats, with a career that spanned two decades.
Off-pitch the young player soon shrugged off his quiet reputation. Single for his entire cricket career, Khan was a regular on gossip pages, spotted at nightclubs surrounded by glamorous women, although he later claimed he never drank alcohol. An LA court ruled that he was the father of Tyrian White, born in 1992 to socialite Sita White.
In 1995, aged 43, he married for the first time, to 21-year-old British heiress Jemima Goldsmith. They had two sons before divorcing in 2004, but remained on good terms. A brief second marriage to BBC journalist Reham Khan, in 2015, ended in divorce after just 10 months and Khan has described it as his biggest regret.
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He married for the third time shortly before becoming prime minister, to Bushra Bibi, a reclusive devotee of Sufi mystic and saint Fariduddin Masud Ganjshakar, or Baba Farid, who Khan initially described as a spiritual mentor. She is also a co-defendant in the corruption case against him.
His election campaign promised to build Pakistan a welfare state and sweep away corruption. Instead, his troubled tenure saw corruption increase, press freedom fall and the economy stumble, forcing Khan to set aside anti-western rhetoric and seek a bailout from the International Monetary Fund, while strengthening ties with China and Russia.
As his political profile rose, Khan’s conservative, misogynist views also came under increasing scrutiny. He called Osama bin Laden a martyr, and when the Taliban seized Kabul in 2021, said they were “breaking the chains of slavery”. He blamed rape victims for “wearing very few clothes”, and more recently appeared to suggest that educating girls was not part of Afghan culture.
But he shrugs off criticism, presenting himself as a champion of Islam, and in the mould of populists worldwide, a representative of “ordinary” Pakistanis.
The majority of his supporters are bound by social constraints on personal conduct that Khan shunned for decades, and endure poverty he has never experienced, but like followers of Donald Trump in America, they have found inspiration in his story.
His popularity was tacitly acknowledged by the military in a recent ban on stories about Khan, and he appears to be counting on it as his best hope for getting out of jail.
“I just have one appeal for you: don’t sit and hide in your homes,” he said in a video statement released after his arrest, casting the fight for his political career as a battle for Pakistan’s soul. “I am not doing this struggle for myself. This is for you and the future of your children.”
