Dr Hasnat Khan: Diana film betrayed our love
THE heart doctor who shared a two-year romance with Princess Diana branded the recent movie on her life a “betrayal” of the couple’s lost love.
Speaking of their affair for the first time since Di’s 1997 death, Hasnat Khan slammed the film Diana — and said he can still sense the late princess guiding him in his work.
He also revealed he is still struggling to come to terms with the death of Princess Diana — 30 years after the horrific Paris car smash which claimed her life.
The 61-year-old, hailed by friends as the love of Diana’s life, shared a secret two-year affair with the royal which ended just weeks before she died in 1997, aged just 36.
He described the pair as “inseparable” during their romance, which began with a chance meeting in 1995 — and claimed he can still sense the caring princess guiding him now as he works with needy children.
As he prepared to fly back out to the Ethiopian heart hospital where he has been performing surgery on poverty-stricken youngsters, Dr Khan told The Sun on Sunday: “It’s been difficult for me to get my head around Diana’s death or talk about it.
“After she died things were difficult, very difficult. We all have our own traumas and get on with it — but when it’s there in your face year in, year out, it’s hard.
“Part of the problem is that I work in an environment where there is a constant changeover of staff, patients and relatives. It’s like being reintroduced to the reality over and over again.”
Dr Khan, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Basildon and Thurrock University Hospital in Essex, is doing his best to get on with his life despite a new barrage of publicity around the release of big-budget movie Diana — parts of which he has branded a “betrayal” of the couple’s romance.
The much-criticised film, starring Naomi Watts and Naveen Andrews, claims to chart the story of his relationship with the princess.
Yet Dr Khan was never consulted over the project and his anger towards the movie’s producers is palpable — not least over suggestions that his family DISAPPROVED of the couple’s affair.
He says: “I can see a lot of humour in a lot of bad things, but in this one I can’t. I haven’t seen the film and I haven’t met anyone who has seen it, but I can tell you for sure that it’s based on a superficial idea. I have kept things very discreet, but now this film is trying to open things up again.”
The movie is based on Kate Snell’s 2001 book Diana: Her Last Love — and both the author and film-makers were anxious to win Dr Khan’s endorsement to boost box office ratings. They will not get it.
Particularly painful for him is the way his beloved family is portrayed. One scene recreates an alleged meeting between the medic and an uncle from
Pakistan who urges him to choose between marrying Diana and his Muslim family.
Dr Khan — dubbed Mr Wonderful by the princess — dismisses the thought, saying:
“One thing I will say is that the idea that my parents didn’t agree with my relationship with Diana is rubbish. Only myself and my closest friends knew what really went on in our relationship.
“Both my parents, grandmother and all close relatives who met Diana liked her very much and my parents and grandmother never objected to our relationship.
“They were very much happy for us to make a decision ourselves and made it clear they would support it 100 per cent. We both had their blessing.
“This amounts to the film projecting a betrayal of our relationship and my relationship with my immediate family. The material in this film has come
from people who met people who only knew us through association. It’s all based on presumptions.”
This month Dr Khan — who remains single after his 2006 arranged marriage to the daughter of an Afghan noble family ended in divorce after 18 months — is taking a break from his NHS work to lead a life-saving surgical mission to Ethiopia for the charity Chain of Hope.
Yet the furore surrounding the big-budget movie jars painfully with his mission to make a difference in the poor East African country.
He says: “I was driving through London last week and I saw posters of the film on billboards. People were talking about it on the radio and I even saw it advertised on a bus.
“I was thinking, ‘I’m going to Ethiopia to treat these kids in a poor country and all the focus in my country is on a film being made by strangers’.
“I thought of the money it was probably making and how it could be spent on medical missions. What can I do? Nothing. I just keep going.
“The film-makers might be good people who do good things for others — I don’t know. But at the end of the day, their job has been to pick up a few stories from relatives and friends and sell a movie.
“If the producers want to go some way to making amends to my family and I, they should donate some of the proceeds to Chain of Hope.”
Along with skilled cardiac colleagues from Basildon, Harefield and Brompton Hospitals, Dr Khan has set up surgery in the Cardiac Centre Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa.
He says: “Sometimes when I do a job like this I do have these very strong feelings that Diana is still with me somehow.
“Not in a religious or spiritual sense, but in the way you feel when you’ve known someone really well in your life and instinctively know how they’d react in a given situation. The past few weeks have been tough and I know Diana would be saying, ‘Stay focused and keep getting on with your life.
Help these children. Be happy’.
“I also know she would be proud of the sort of work we’re doing here in Ethiopia. She was a great humanitarian and that’s how she should always be remembered.”
Dr Khan trained under the acclaimed “father of heart transplantation”
Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub and is now a highly respected surgeon himself.
But that doesn’t stop him enjoying golf, cooking and evenings listening to jazz with colleagues. Indeed, it was his down-to-earth traits that were said to have captivated the fun-loving princess.
Their affair began on August 31, 1995, after Diana received a frantic phone call from her long-time friend Oonagh Toffolo. Her husband Joe was critically ill after a triple heart bypass at London’s Royal Brompton Hospital.
Oonagh called Diana, who raced to the hospital and bumped into the handsome and unflappable surgeon who had performed the op — Dr Khan. Diana was soon won over by the affable and easy-going medic’s lack of airs and graces and before long romance blossomed.
But after two years, the affair ended following a meeting between the pair in South London’s Battersea Park shortly before Diana died. Dr Khan said he thought the princess had met someone else after she returned from a holiday with millionaire businessman Mohamed Fayed and his family — because she was “not her normal self”.
Only when he heard news broadcasts did he learn of Diana’s relationship with
Mr Fayed’s son Dodi, who died alongside her in Paris.
Dr Khan adds: “Many things have been said about Diana as a person. Some have been right but many have been completely wrong.
“One thing’s for sure. When you are inseparable from someone for two years, it’s a long time and you get to know if someone is coming from the heart or not.
“Diana’s charity work came from the inside — the bottom of her heart — and that’s how she should always be remembered. No one teaches people to care like she did. Doctors can tell how genuine someone is by the way they
approach patients.
“Diana didn’t need publicity in that way. She could have gone to fashion shows or galas and had a much bigger stage. I don’t mind being known as Diana’s ex-partner because you can’t change history.
“But everyone wants spicy details and I’ll never reveal them. How I’d really like to be known is as a good surgeon working in a team to get on with the job of saving lives.”
Day I was taken for her driver
DOWN-to-earth Dr Khan’s ordinariness helped win the love of a princess — but once saw him mistaken for her DRIVER.
Chuckling as he recalls the incident, he says: “In 1996 I travelled to Beirut with my teacher Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub.
“We had been performing heart surgery on children from the Palestinian camps through his charity Chain of Hope and I was moved by what I’d seen.
“I came home and said to Diana, ‘Would you like to do something for Chain of Hope’? and she replied, ‘I’d love to’.
“So I said, ‘Meet me at Harefield Hospital’, and took her into Professor Yacoub’s office.
“When I opened the door there was another girl in there called Claudia, who was from the charity’s French wing.
“I didn’t have to introduce the world’s most famous woman, so just grabbed a handful of sandwiches from a tray, began eating because I was starving, and said, ‘I’ll leave you all to get on with it. See you in half an hour’.
“The meeting went well but apparently after we left, Claudia told the professor, ‘Diana is wonderful but her chauffeur is SO rude. He just ate the sandwiches and didn’t even introduce her. She should change the driver’.”
Two-year romance
KEY dates during Dr Khan’s romance with Diana.
AUGUST 31 1995: Diana meets the doctor, then a modestly-paid NHS junior surgeon, at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London.
MID-SEPTEMBER: First date as he asks her to accompany him to his aunt’s to collect books.
NOVEMBER 30: She makes a night-time visit to the hospital.
JULY 1996: As divorce with Prince Charles looms, Diana tells pals she wants to marry Hasnat.
MAY 1997: She talks to his family in Pakistan about marriage.
JUNE: Tired of waiting, Diana agrees to join tycoon’s son Dodi Fayed in St Tropez.
JULY 28: Diana meets Hasnat in London and tells him that their romance is over.