Princess Diana and Hasnat Khan: An impossible love story

In a world obsessed with fairy tale romances, Princess Diana’s most profound, and perhaps ultimate, love story unfolded in secret.

Amid a messy divorce from the future king of England, Charles, and a tabloid fixation on her every move, Diana gave her heart away to a man who could not be more far removed from the trappings of her royal lifestyle, a Pakistani heart surgeon named Hasnat Khan.

Let’s pull back the curtain on a royal romance that, for two years, brought Diana closest to the kind of love and happiness she craved for, and ultimately proved to be her ‘one true love’.

Who was Hasnat Khan?

Described as a ‘serious man’ by those who knew him, Hasnat Khan, was a junior surgeon in the National Health Service (NHS) when Diana first met him at the Royal Brompton Hospital in 1995.

Working 90-hours per week and living in a modest one-bedroom apartment, Hasnat’s life was far removed from Diana’s reality, but the Princess was unafraid of diving right into the normalcy of it.

Writing for Vanity Fair, Sarah Ellison shared, “Her friends tell stories about how she puttered around his small one-bedroom apartment and tidied up, doing the dishes and folding his laundry. Hasnat didn’t ride or hunt. He liked jazz and Guinness, so he and Diana stood in line to see the late-night acts…”

Diana and Hasnat’s fateful meeting

Diana and Hasnat’s first meeting was a chance encounter, and one that left quite the impression on her; no other person had shown less interest in her in her life than Hasnat!

An attending surgeon at the Royal Brompton Hospital, Hasnat was introduced to Diana by Oonagh Toffolo, his patient’s wife. Hasnat barely nodded in Diana’s direction.

The mark this left on Diana would change the trajectory of her life for the next two years. Diana reportedly turned to her friend and said, “Isn’t he drop-dead gorgeous? And his name is Hasnat Khan. It’s written on his shoes.”

For Diana, Hasnat wasn’t just a handsome man for her to court amid her impending divorce from Prince Charles, but what Ellison described as ‘a shot at normalcy… and a man with whom Diana hoped she might find the happiness that had long eluded her.’

This encounter turned into Diana regularly visiting the hospital to see Hasnat. She was convinced that Hasnat was the one, telling her energy healer Simone Simmons, “I think I’ve met her Mr. Wonderful.”

Weeks later, they were on their ‘first date’, visiting Hasnat’s uncle and aunt in Stratford-upon-Avon.

“I did not think for one minute that she would say yes, but I asked her if she would like to come with me. I was very surprised when she said she would. After this, our friendship turned into a relationship,” he later told the police during an inquest into Diana’s death.

Diana and Hasnat’s romance

Diana nurtured their romance through 1995 and 1996, before getting carried away and inviting media attention towards it.

In their moments alone, they enjoyed a kind of normalcy that Diana craved for; they would attend jazz shows in disguises, enjoy KFC, and chase around hospital corners at night.

She sent flower arrangements to the hospital, placed calls under names like ‘Dr. Armani’, and it was only a matter of time before someone called the florist and demanded to know more, with the florist admitting that the deliveries were from Kensington Palace.

“After this, the press went everywhere trying to get information on me,” Hasnat would tell the police later.

Their future started unraveling here, with Hasnat wanting to avoid the press and realizing how Diana’s celebrity meant that her version of ‘normal’ could never be the same as his.

Despite this, Diana met and mingled with Hasnat’s conservative Pashtun family, in an effort to convince them for marriage. This was not to be, as Hasnat’s parents remained vehemently against their match, wanting a Pakistani Muslim girl for their son.

Her friend Jemima Khan, wife to Hasnat’s distant cousin Imran Khan, shared, “Diana was madly in love with Hasnat and wanted to marry him, even if that meant living in Pakistan…” Diana even considered converting to Islam for him, it has been reported.

By 1997, it was clear that Hasnat would not marry Diana, leading the Princess into the arms of Dodi Al Fayed, who many claim was an attempt from her side to make Hasnat jealous.

A fateful ending for Diana and Hasnat

In their final encounters, Diana would meet Hasnat a few times in July 1997; during this time she was consistently seen with Dodi Al Fayed aboard his $30 million yacht.

“When you know someone very well, you know when something is not right, and that is exactly how I felt when I spoke to her,” Hasnat said of the time.

She would officially end things between them at the end of July 1997, and launch herself into travelling; from Sardinia, to London, to Bosnia, before embarking on a cruise with friend Rosa Monckton, who shared how they talked more about Hasnat on this trip than of Dodi, claiming, “the relationship with Dodi was designed to make Hasnat jealous.”

A week after this cruise, Diana took the fateful trip to Paris with Dodi, that famously ended with a high-speed chase that not only took her and Dodi’s life, but also ended her romance with Hasnat, who had reached out to her on the night of her death.

And thus, the world will never know where Diana and Hasnat’s love would have gone had she not died that night.