Netflix’s The Crown season 5 spotlights Diana’s most publicized (and final) relationship—with Dr. Hasnat Khan—following the dissolution of her marriage to Prince Charles. Diana and Dr. Hasnat Khan first met in 1995 through Diana’s acupuncturist, Oonagh Shanley-Toffolo, at the hospital where Dr. Khan performed a triple-bypass cardiac procedure on Shanley-Toffolo’s husband. Lending Shanley-Toffolo emotional support, Diana received the news with Shanley-Toffolo of her husband’s post-surgical complications, which the scene of their encounter in The Crown season 5 portrays accurately.
According to Dr. Khan’s statement to the police in 2004, Diana would often visit the Royal Brompton Hospital in London where he worked, and he and Diana would have quick chats in between his rounds on the weekends. They quickly became friends, and after a spur-of-the-moment decision to visit Dr. Khan’s aunt and uncle in Stratford-upon-Avon together, they transformed the friendship into a romantic relationship. They then went on to have a two-year-long relationship, going their separate ways in 1997 just months before Diana’s fatal car accident in Paris.
Why Dr. Khan & Princess Diana’s Relationship Ended
Dr. Khan was not only the last long-term lover that Diana had but arguably the most significant one aside from her ex-husband of fifteen years, Prince Charles (now King Charles III). Once Diana’s divorce with Charles was finalized, she was able to pursue a real relationship with Khan without pressure from the royal family to maintain peaceful appearances with Charles. The princess and the doctor had discussions of marriage, and Diana had introduced Khan to her two sons, Prince William and Prince Harry. According to Khan, Diana “just wanted her sons to know what was happening in her life,” and in the spirit of transparency, Diana did not withhold her relationship from the young princes.
Although Dr. Khan insists that he and Diana never made any concrete plans to get married, and that no engagement took place between the two, he admits that elopement was brought up as a possibility, one that he shot down immediately as a “ridiculous idea.” Despite the emotional trauma she endured in her first marriage to Charles, Diana was hopeful to find happiness and fulfillment in a second marriage. She had much more serious intentions to get married than the doctor did, asking her personal butler Paul Burrell to inquire a priest about getting them married in secret, to which Khan responded, “Do you honestly think you can just bring a priest here and get married?” Evidently, the two never wed, and although Diana had told Khan that she would love to have a daughter, she stayed on a contraceptive pill throughout their relationship to avoid having children as well.
A major stressor on Diana and Khan that prevented them from getting married was the intense and incessant interest that the media paid to Diana’s personal life, a life that Khan was then inevitably entangled in. Throughout their two-year relationship, media coverage and harassment was what Dr. Khan considered to be their “only problem.” With the likes of Martin Bashir exploiting Diana for an interview, it is no wonder that Dr. Khan felt threatened by the media’s attention. He explains that after their relationship was found out by the press in November 1995, they followed him constantly, even to the hospital where he worked, which endangered not only the doctor himself but the staff of the hospital as well.
Not only did the tabloids and reporters harass Dr. Khan but they also began pestering the people close to him, including ex-girlfriends and former professors, in an attempt to squeeze gossip out of them. “My main concern about us getting married was that my life would be hell,” Khan told the police, “because of who she was.” He also received death threats in the mail—cutouts of him with a noose around his neck. Khan once suggested the option for them to move to Pakistan, away from the British press, where they could live “vaguely normal [lives],” but with the young princes William and Harry being second and third in line to the throne at the time respectively, Diana could not have uprooted herself from Kensington Palace and deserted her sons.
Although Dr. Khan never spoke of the specific reasons to their separation, he stated that he felt something was “not right” toward the end of the relationship. Alluding to his suspicions that Diana had already begun to see Dodi Al-Fayed behind his back while they were still together, Dr. Khan said, “I told her that I strongly suspected there was someone else, and I remember saying to her at the time ‘You are dead’, meaning her reputation was dead,” which proved to be a much deadlier prophecy than he could have known at the time. Regardless of whether Khan’s accusations were true at the time, the intense scrutiny levied onto them and their relationship by the media, as well as the presence of Dodi Al-Fayed and his father Mohamed Al Fayed’s close friendship with Diana were too much of a strain to their relationship. It is uncertain which party had initiated the breakup, with Diana’s friends stating that she was distressed by Khan’s decision to end the relationship, while Khan testified to the police in 2004 that Diana had told him that “it was all over between [them],” a claim backed up by Diana’s butler, Burrell. Nevertheless, by the summer of 1997, the fracture in their relationship was irreparable. They went their separate ways.
What Happened To Dr. Khan After His Relationship With Princess Diana
After the relationship ended between Diana and Dr. Khan, Diana soon began to date the son of billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed, Dodi Al-Fayed (as Khan had previously suspected), and Diana remained with Dodi until the car crash that killed them both on August 31, 1997. In 2006, at age 48, Dr. Khan married 28-year-old Hadia Sher Ali, a woman of Afghan royal descent, though the two divorced 18 months later. In 2017, Dr. Khan married Somi Sohail, to whom he remains married to this day.
What Dr. Khan Has Said About Princess Diana Since Her Death
Despite their rocky separation, Dr. Khan has only kind things to say about the beloved princess, resistant to divulging any more private detail to their relationships over the years since her death, but confessing that he would have liked to stay “very good friends” with her had she still been alive. In fact, friendship is the theme of every statement Khan has given about Diana, which warrants his continued loyalty to her memory. Additionally, Khan testifies that Diana was kind and down to earth, very punctual, and an excellent mother—all well-known and well-portrayed aspects of the late Princess Diana in The Crown.