Jemima Khan sets her tigers on the tyrant

Jemima Khan talks exclusively to The Sunday Times, UK about why emergency rule in Pakistan has forced her ex-husband to go on the run and how their sons are joining his cause

Early last week a strange number flashed up on Jemima Khan’s mobile phone. Puzzled, she picked up the call to hear a familiar voice on the other end saying urgently: “Jem, it’s me.”

It was her exhusband Imran Khan, the Pakistani cricket captain turned politician, who has been on the run since security forces tried to put him under house arrest last weekend. The brief call – terminated abruptly so as not to be traceable – was to reassure her and their two sons that he was safe. “It was like hearing a ghost,” she says, laughing with relief. “He’s fine. Obviously he’s outraged but he’s safe, thank God.”

Imran was at his father’s home in Lahore – where he and Jemima lived for the first five years of their marriage – when President Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency, ostensibly because “terrorists” were threatening his presidency.

Musharraf’s critics believe it was an attempt to preempt a Supreme Court judgment that would have declared his recent reelection as president invalid. For months the president has been at daggers drawn with the judiciary, which prides itself on being a neutral and secular upholder of Pakistan’s constitution. Full Story By Margarette Driscoll