Imran Khan looks set to become Pakistan’s prime minister, with nearly half the votes counted from yesterday’s election.
His PTI party is currently in the lead and has shrugged off accusations of vote-rigging.
Yet Khan is “famous less for his political acumen” than for leading Pakistan to victory in the Cricket World Cup in 1992, says The Observer.
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“In British terms, this is the equivalent of the late, much-missed Bobby Moore running for prime minister,” says the newspaper.
Khan was “a favourite with women during his cricketing career”, says the London Evening Standard, and “his tall, dark and handsome image led to him being dubbed cricket’s greatest playboy”.
He finally bowed out from the party scene in 1995, when he married Jemima Goldsmith. He has since remarried twice.
Here is everything you need to know about his three wives.
Jemima Goldsmith
The daughter of business tycoon Sir James Goldsmith and Lady Annabel Vane Tempest Stewart, Goldsmith studied English at Bristol University but quit before she could graduate in order to marry Khan. Goldsmith first met her future husband at a nightclub in London when she was 21 and he was 42.
After marrying, she converted to Islam and they set up home in Pakistan, so that Khan could pursue politics. A budding entrepreneur, Goldsmith launched her own fashion label and developed her own brand of ketchup. The couple had two sons, Sulaiman and Qasim, but in June 2004 it was announced that their marriage was over.
Reham Khan
Khan married former BBC weather presenter Reham Ramzan in 2015, but the couple divorced less than a year later. Now 45, she recently published a tell-all memoir about their marriage that has caused uproar in Pakistan.
Ramzan was born in Libya to Pakistani parents and has three children from a previous marriage. She was a weather girl and presenter on the BBC regional news programme South Today.
Bushra Maneka
Khan had a very different courtship with his third wife, he tells the Daily Mail, and did not see her face until after they were married.
“Bushra Maneka, 39, is a leading scholar and spiritual guide in the mystic Sufi branch of Islam and she will not meet men other than her husband with her face uncovered, nor venture unveiled outside her house, which she rarely leaves,” explains the newspaper.
Maneka is a mother of five and was still married to another man when she met Khan three years ago. She wed the former cricket star in February this year.
