Jemima Khan has come down in her socks to the garden courtyard of her Fulham home to greet me. It’s a bit damp on the pathway, and she’s standing on tiptoes, thoughtfully inspecting the ends of her long mane of chestnut hair. I’ve found my way through the video-monitored outer gate, through an archway and across another courtyard, and I can see her in the inner sanctum, tiny and feathery and very, very slim in her jeans and clingy top. "Hello," she says, briskly, looking up from her hair. Pleasure and pain are twitching about in that famous face, which is just about held together with a smile. She turns and almost runs away through the front door of her house, past a mass of huge bulging sacks in the hall. It later transpires these are blankets gathered for the Pakistan earthquake relief effort.
But Jemima has already bounded on up the stairs, two at a time. I follow her into a cavernous white room furnished with huge white sofas. She perches on a giant stool in front of the fireplace, and with her smile now turned right up to megawatt twinkle, she urges me to tuck into some sushi.
She has just returned from an intensive and emotionally draining three-day trip to Kenya, in her role as a UK ambassador for Unicef, helping to launch a new global campaign to support children affected by HIV/Aids. What she saw, in those Kenyan hospitals, slums and refuges, were hundreds of children orphaned by Aids and infected themselves with HIV, and it has, quite simply, stunned her. "The stories were just unbelievable.
I met this little girl. It was a particularly pathetic case because when she was six, her father, who was HIV-positive, infected her because he thought it would cure him to have sex with a virgin. She’s now 11 and her mother and father have both died of Aids, and her grandmother has taken her nine siblings away because she carries what is seen in this village as a curse, and which is evident in the lesions on her arms and head. She told me she has no friends because whenever she coughs, all the children run away."
Jemima looks shocked and pale at the memory. She is sitting curled up like a cat in the corner of one of her sofas. She is very delicate and, I realise, emotionally drained by all this. She looks tired. Today, she is not done up with the kind of killing beauty that falls like a sheet of steel. She appears simply as a natural and attractive young woman: intelligent, articulate, but exhausted.
But the strange thing is, if you think what she has been through and what she has seen of the world in the past ten years, in her idealistic marriage to Imran Khan, her move to Pakistan and conversion to Islam, her horribly public divorce, and then her tabloid-perfect liaison with Hugh Grant, she still seems terribly young. It may be her thin, elongated body, like a teenager’s, or her way of speaking in a high, delicate voice, rather excitable, gabbling sometimes to get it all out, with the occasional intonations and phrases that you might hear in an English Home-Counties boarding school.
Jemima was born in 1974 to the half-Jewish, half-Catholic Sir James Goldsmith and the English aristocrat, Annabel Birley. For the first four years of her life, her parents were married, but both to other people. Her mother, the daughter of the 8th Marquis of Londonderry, was known as the most social woman of her generation, the woman after whom Annabel’s nightclub was named. Goldsmith, who died in 1997, was the flamboyant billionaire financier, a buccaneering and uncompromising figure, with houses all over the world, a customised Boeing 757 jet and a reported fortune of £1.5 billion.
Predictably, Jemima grew up in a whirl of parties, her life a big warm pool where everyone swam about being famous and rich and lovely. Then, at 21 while studying English at Bristol University, she met Imran Khan, the dashing cricketing deity and playboy. He was twice her age. Abandoning her degree, she plunged into a romantic, idealistic marriage. She moved to Pakistan to live with his family, converted to Islam (she’s still a practising Muslim), and learnt to speak Urdu. It was a hugely transformative experience for this immensely privileged and sheltered English girl.
"When I went, there were definitely things that I found very, very hard, but I see that in retrospect more than I did at the time. I now think, my God, I mean, how did I live five years with Imran’s whole family, who I was very close to? I mean, I really liked and respected them, but obviously, they lived very, very differently, and there was his father and his two sisters and their husbands and children, there were ten children in the house, and kind of a chaotic environment, and um, you know, I do think, how did I do that? I think the fact that I was very young made it easier to adjust and fit in. Certainly, I couldn’t make a change like that now.
"Frankly, the most difficult thing was the politics more than the cultural issues, the fact that there was such a focus on how I lived and how I conformed, which wouldn’t have been the case if I hadn’t been married to someone high-profile and in politics.
"So I had to over-conform, and I had to make a double effort to be seen to do the right thing, because I was a foreigner with a Jewish background. I was his Achilles heel, politically, and he has a reputation for being honest and straightforward and uncorrupt. So a way of attacking him was to attack me."
Personal attacks against her were published in newspapers, religious parties demonstrated, demanding her citizenship be revoked and that she should be expelled, and she was arrested at customs, falsely charged with smuggling antiques. "I was involved in two election campaigns, and the last one was particularly difficult and I got quite demoralised. It was lonely as he was away a lot during that period, but it was very hard to complain as he was clearly doing it for altruistic reasons – not for money or glory. He always saw his career in politics as a natural extension of his charity work. That said, each time he came back from another three-week stint in his consituency there’d be another suitcase resolutely packed. After a while I just got fed up." Her voice trails away with obvious regret.
Comparisons to Princess Diana are easy to draw. She, too, made a romantic and idealistic marriage at a young age to a very high-profile, much older man. Like Jemima, Diana was a privileged and sheltered English girl, inexperienced in the ways of the world, who found herself pitched into a very conservative and controlling family, her every move and every outfit scrutinised by the outside world, and was left unsupported through all this by her husband. Struggling with two young boys, she divorced and threw herself into charitable causes.
