Imran Khan: From prison cell to political comeback?

His constant criticism of Washington's tactics in its long-running campaign against the Taliban, particularly the use of CIA drone strikes against Taliban positions across the border in Pakistan, earned him the nickname "Taliban Khan" in the Pakistani media.

But his populist approach, in which he positioned himself as a devoted defender of Pakistani sovereignty, meant he became an increasingly potent figure in Pakistani politics, to the extent that ultimately resulted in him claiming the coveted office of prime minister.

Khan, whose close association with Pakistan's powerful military establishment is said to have helped his rise to power, maintained his controversial profile after taking office.

While most of his time was devoted to tackling the parlous state of the Pakistani economy, which had long been blighted by widespread corruption and rampant inflation, Khan's also maintained his highly critical position on America's involvement in Afghanistan, especially after the Biden administration's chaotic withdrawal in August 2021.

Khan publicly condemned Washington's handling of the crisis, causing relations between the US and Pakistan to deteriorate further.

His robust anti-American position, together with the failure of his economic reforms, is said to have led to a deepening rift with Pakistan's military establishment, which many Pakistani observers believe ultimately led to his removal from office in April 2022.

Attempted assassination

His attempts to cling to power failed after Pakistan's Supreme Court overturned his decision to dissolve parliament, and defections from his ruling coalition meant he lost the no confidence vote that followed.

Khan's removal from office meant he joined a long list of elected Pakistani prime ministers who have failed to see out their full times - none has done so since independence in 1947.

Despite this serious setback, Khan maintained a high public profile, and narrowly avoided an assassination attempt when gunmen opened fire on his convoy in November 2022 as he led a protest march on Islamabad demanding a fresh general election.

But Khan's efforts to revive his political career ended abruptly on 5 August when he was sentenced to three years in prison on corruption charges and taken into custody for the second time since his removal from office. Khan's defenders have dismissed the charges as baseless.

The sentence also blocks Khan, Pakistan's most popular politician, from contesting elections expected in Pakistan later this year.

There have subsequently been suggestions that the US has been directly involved in Khan's political demise after a classified Pakistani government document emerged suggesting Washington wanted him silenced after he failed to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Small, dirty prison cell

What is not in doubt is that the fortunes of the former playboy-turned-politician have now reached their absolute nadir.

Following the 70-year-old Khan's imprisonment at a jail in Attock district on the outskirts of Islamabad, his lawyers complained that he was being held in a small, dirty prison cell. "It is a small room which has got an open washroom where he said there were flies in the daytime and insects in the night," complained one of his legal team.

In some respects, Khan should count his blessings that he has not suffered a similar fate to some of his predecessors as prime minister who, rather than finding themselves languishing in a squalid prison cell, ended up paying with their lives.

In 1977, then-prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was deposed in a military coup, put on trial under martial law, and then executed. Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who was held responsible for Bhutto's execution, was subsequently killed in a mysterious helicopter crash in 1988, while Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister's daughter who herself won the premiership, was assassinated in a suicide bombing in Rawalpindi in 2007.

Certainly, Khan's current predicament does not bode well for the future prospects of a man who, until now, has enjoyed a somewhat gilded existence.

About Imran

Imran Ahmad Khan Niazi was born in 1952 into an affluent family in the Pakistani city of Lahore. He described himself as a shy child who grew up with four sisters in an urban Pashtun family.

As a young man, he was privately educated in England, before going to the University of Oxford where he graduated from Keble College in 1975 with a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

His international cricket career had begun four years earlier when he made his debut for Pakistan against England at Edgbaston, Birmingham. The sportsman came to the cricketing world's attention in the early 1970s as an aggressive fast-paced bowler.

After graduating, he lived in a flat in Knightsbridge and female friends included girls-about-town such as Susannah Constantine (who had dated Princess Margaret's son Viscount Linley), Lady Liza Campbell and society artist Emma Sergeant.

As his friend, the model Marie Helvin said: "Everyone falls for Imran. He has a scent that is very attractive to women."

A regular in gossip columns, Khan was defiant about his lifestyle, telling a 1984 interviewer: "In Pakistan you just don't meet single girls. There are no discos, no bars, no meeting places. Meeting women was among "the very decadent pleasures in life which I enjoy,' Khan said.

However, he claimed he rediscovered his faith in the mid-1990s, a surprise to many who had witnessed his party lifestyle.

Cricket superstar

Cricket remained an important part of his early life culminating, at the age of 39, when he became a national hero after captaining Pakistan's heavily disadvantaged team to the knockout round of the 1992 Cricket World Cup, defeating top-seed New Zealand in the semi-finals.

In the finals, Khan took the wicket to seal the championship against second-seed England himself. It was the climax of a cricket career that spanned more than two decades.

In 1995, he married Jemima Goldsmith, daughter of billionaire business tycoon James Goldsmith. The then 42-year-old proposed to the 20-year-old Bristol student, who was raised as a Christian and has a Jewish background, via her father.

She was an unlikely match for the star with burgeoning political ambitions in Pakistan, but within a few weeks, they had married in a traditional Pakistani wedding ceremony in Paris.

A month later, on 21 June, they were married again in a civil ceremony in England, followed by a reception at the Goldsmiths' house in Surrey, attended by London's elite. The media described the wedding as 'the wedding of the century'.

Troubled marriage, failed campaign

Jemima converted to Islam, learned Urdu and moved to Islamabad, where she gave birth to her first son, Sulaiman Isa Khan, and lived in a compound in Lahore with Imran's extended family. She was presented to her husband's countrymen at a rally in Peshawar and made a speech in Urdu, asking women to vote in the elections.

The party did not win a single seat in that election, only one in 2004. It was becoming clear that the very fact that Imran Khan had married a woman of Jewish extraction was to be used against him.

"In the beginning, the idea was that we would campaign together," he recalled.

"But I had to pull her out of politics to shield her from it. That is when our problems began because we were spending time apart. That then exacerbated the problems of a cross-cultural marriage, and she inevitably missed her friends, family and home more than she might have."

The couple had another son, Qasim, in 1999, but for the final two years of the marriage, Jemima was based in England, and in 2004 they divorced.

'He thinks he's a unique leader'

A second brief marriage to BBC weather girl Reham Nayyar Khan also ended in divorce after just ten months together.

The divorced mother of three met him in 2012 after she moved to Pakistan and interviewed him for a television news channel. After a second interview, he invited her to dinner, she said, telling her he had something important to discuss and then proposed marriage.

Her disillusionment was swift. She claimed that he was so spoiled he did not know how to use a microwave oven or a cashpoint.

"He's the only celebrity we have in Pakistan and expects everyone to do everything. He's so narcissistic and single-minded about his goal (of becoming prime minister) that he forgets the appropriate emotional response to things. He thinks he's a unique leader. I married him because I believed in him and his mission."

In a self-published memoir, she claimed that Imran fathered five children out of wedlock, something his advisers strenuously deny.

His third marriage to Bushra Bibi, a spiritual leader whom Khan had come to know during his visits to a 13th-century shrine in Pakistan, reflected his deepening interest in Sufism.

Retirement and politics

Shortly after Pakistan's victory in the World Cup, Khan retired from cricket and began searching for a new pursuit. He found politics to be his new calling.

In 1996, he started his own political party called Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). Despite its founder's name recognition, the newly formed party struggled to gain traction.

Khan was seen as too cosmopolitan, too Western, and too far removed from the familial and tribal-based political dynasties that dominated Pakistan's political landscape to achieve real change.

It was not until the early 2010s that Khan's political movement began to gain momentum. The ripple effects of the financial crisis left Pakistan with a stagnating economy and a balance-of-payments crisis.

Massive flooding of the Indus River destroyed much of the valley's crops and infrastructure. An estimated 20 million Pakistanis were affected by the flood.

Having spent much of his early political career defending General Pervez Musharraf's administration in the belief that Musharraf would end the corruption wrought by Pakistan's longstanding political dynasties, Khan began delivering an anti-establishment, anti-corruption message of his own.

By 2011, Khan's political rallies drew crowds that numbered in the hundreds of thousands and found heavy support from the urban middle-class and university students drawn to his populist message.

He spoke of a popular "tsunami" coming for the elite families that had dictated Pakistani politics for decades. He argued that Pakistan should distance itself from the US-led war on terror in response to increased US drone strikes throughout Pakistan.

Becoming prime minister

In 2018, Khan's popularity helped the PTI win a total of 149 seats in the National Assembly. While falling shy of the 172 seats needed for a majority, Khan was able to form a coalition government that gave him enough votes to become prime minister.

Taking office, he announced his plans for a radical "100-day agenda" which he promised would transform the nation's economy, laying the groundwork for the creation of 10 million jobs in his first term through infrastructure projects designed to revive the country's manufacturing sector.

Yet, for all his undeniable ambition, Khan's attempts to implement populist reforms made little headway, as they faced stiff opposition from a broad range of establishment interests, with the result that, when Khan was eventually forced from office, the Pakistani economy faced the same dire predicament it had faced when he first took office.

As someone who, as a sportsman, was renowned for his determination and courage, it would be foolish to dismiss Khan's prospects of one day making a political comeback.

But at a moment when he finds himself languishing in a dank prison cell, it is hard to see how someone, even with his tenacious spirit, can achieve the impossible and return to frontline Pakistani politics.