http://sport.guardian.co.uk/cricket/…807219,00.html
Excerpts
‘As I got to know the Pathans’ character,’ he says, ‘I recognised in it the competitiveness I was born with and the determination not to show fear.’
This lack of fear is a crucial quality, he suggests, in Pakistani politics as well as Pakistani cricket. When he stood at the last election in 2003, he says, ‘the government stuffed the ballots. One guy who was against me was the biggest drug mafia guy in the area. They let him out of jail to run in the election because they thought he controlled the area. But still I got record votes. In most of Pakistan it is a feudal country. People are very scared and oppressed by authority. But when you move to these wilder areas, they are not so easily suppressed.’
Did he think, despite the fears people have, he would have more seats in parliament by now? ‘Well,’ he says, crisply, ‘It is not easy to win against a military dictator in an election that is being run by the security services.’
All this sounds a very long way from the Imran Khan of the Seventies and Eighties who spent his evenings in Annabel’s and Tramp nightclubs in London’s West End and his days in Nigel Dempster’s gossip columns for bedding a series of debutantes - including the late Sita White (daughter of Lord White), Susannah Constantine (Viscount Linley’s ex), Lady Liza Campbell and the artist Emma Sergeant. He had come to England from Aitchison College, a relic of the Raj, to study at Oxford, where he was captain of cricket, before playing for Worcestershire and Sussex. In those days he was very much the playboy prince. I wonder what he makes of that former self. ‘I have never claimed to be an angel,’ he says, still behind his shades. ‘I am a humble sinner. In my cricket career I would keep a log and write down the areas I had failed in so I could make them strengths. I have tried to do that in life, too.’
and why on earth this article/read is in the cricketnama section, it should be in geo-political section