Heart surgeon Hasnat Khan was running to fat, smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, and had a passion for Guinness, Carlsberg lager, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and late-night jazz. Yet the moment Princess Diana set eyes on the unprepossessing figure of the Pakistan-born surgeon her heart skipped a beat. ‘He’s drop-dead gorgeous,’ she told her friend Oonagh, after their brief encounter.
According to Morton, over the next 18 days Diana was a constant visitor in Toffolo’s room, much to his amusement. A besotted Diana was soon shadowing Khan in his rounds at the hospital, comforting patients, and even watching him perform heart surgery. The two started dating and Diana began reading Gray’s Anatomy and the Quran (Khan came from a Muslim family), and watching the hospital drama Casualty.
In Khan, Diana saw a man with a pure heart and altruistic spirit. “He was a male version of what she wanted to do—save lives and give to people,” one friend recalled.
For his part, Khan was smitten with Diana’s down-to-earth friendliness. “[He was] the first man who was completely unimpressed by her glamour,” Diana’s friend Cosima Somerset remembered. “He liked her for herself.”
In many ways, they were a remarkably normal couple. Diana would join him in disguise, queuing up for jazz clubs in London. She would spend days doing housework in his apartment, or in her place eating KFC Hasnat brought after his shift. Of course, there were sexier moments—according to Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell, she once greeted him in nothing but a fur coat and her sapphires and diamonds.
“She was emotionally more stable when she was with him,” a friend of Diana’s told Bedell Smith. “He taught her that she could be loved.”
Diana seemed aware of this fact, telling one friend, “I found my peace. He has given me all the things I need.”
Diana envisioned a future with Khan: marriage, more children (hopefully girls), and a life building hospitals for underprivileged children. “She felt that Hasnat and her could change the world,” a friend noted.
And Khan believed in her. “She did good things because she wanted to, not because of her status,” he recalled. “She had an inner desire. It genuinely came from within her.”
But Diana knew that a new marriage (she and Charles were officially divorced on August 28, 1996) would cause a media frenzy and perhaps upset her beloved sons. “If I fall in love with somebody else the sparks will fly and God help us,” she reportedly told Prince Charles.
Yet it was her celebrity to blame for the romance’s undoing. The affable and unassuming Khan not only worried about the difference in their cultures but his ability to handle life in the public eye. “My main concern about us getting married was that my life would be hell because of who she was,” he said. “I knew I would not be able to live a normal life, and if we ever had children together, I would not be able to take them anywhere or do normal things with them.”