He loved Diana, yes. How could he not? This beautiful, radiant creature, adored by the world, had chosen him, an obscure Pakistani doctor, when she could have had her pick of any billionaire on earth. But it must have troubled Khan that the love he gave her never seemed to be enough. Was anyone's? "Diana needed more love than perhaps any Englishman can give," observes Diana's girlhood friend and later Tory M.P. Hugo Swire. But there may have been no man alive who could have answered the clamorous needs brought on by Diana's early abandonment by her mother, who chose her lover over her family when Diana was six.
Hasnat's pager would go off 20 times a day on his medical rounds. For a woman so sensitive to the needs of others, Diana was strangely blind when it came to those of the people closest to her. She wanted to own his future, arrange his life. She wanted to re-arrange his surgical schedule so that he could travel with her. "Diana believed, against all the evidence," opined the essayist Clive James in The New Yorker shortly after her death, "that there was some kind of enchanted place called Abroad, where she could be understood and where she could lead a more normal life." James saw this place as a recurring theme in the last years of Diana's life. Her dream was a marriage between two globe-trotting humanitarians, rushing to trouble spots with her compassion and his doctor's bag. An overdose of public adoration had made her almost delusional. She told me over lunch that day in New York that she thought she could resolve the conflicts of Northern Ireland: "I'm very good at sorting people's heads out." She wanted to lift Hasnat out of the annoying grind and insane hours of the Brompton Hospital into some medical habitat where they could live together in sunny exile with a swimming pool—in Australia or South Africa. At an international think-tank dinner in Rimini, Italy, she found herself next to Professor Christiaan Barnard, the septuagenarian heart-transplant pioneer. She lobbied him hard to get Hasnat a position in South Africa and twice gave him dinner at Kensington Palace to discuss Hasnat's future. The proud Dr. Khan went ballistic, according to Kate Snell, when, on finally meeting Barnard, he was asked to submit his résumé.