Jemima Khan discusses Princess Diana's 'arranged' marriage

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Jemima Khan, who was pals with Princess Diana and was once married to Pakistan’s former Prime Minister, Imran Khan, declared that arranged marriages were normal and commonplace for royal families. She suggested that the practise is no different than an algorithm choosing a potential match for someone on a dating app.

Jemima had been discussing her debut as a film director on the forthcoming movie What’s Love Got To Do With It? with Lorraine Kelly when she made the comments today.

“Arranged marriage is totally different from forced marriage, but when we think about arranged marriage – your friend, Princess Diana – that was arranged really, wasn’t it?” Lorraine quizzed.

Jemima replied: “Pretty much. I mean as close to arranged as you could get in that it was an appropriate match chosen by the parents and a sort of committee of family members.”

She added: “The Royal Family used to pretty much always have arranged marriages and it’s still the majority in the world.”

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Princess Diana visited Lahore, Pakistan as part of one of her royal tours, and she was famously pictured meeting with Imran and Jemima there in 1996.

She travelled to meet the latter the following year too, just weeks before her life was tragically cut short in a Paris car crash.

Jemima defended the controversial and divisive topic of arranged marriage during her ITV interview.

“We can decide to be set up even by an algorithm,” she shrugged to Lorraine.

She added that arranged, or “assisted” marriage is simply “an introduction by the people who love you most, know you best”.

Jemima revealed that her latest film is a look at the “different approaches” people use across cultures to find love.

Exploring the diverse range of options in Britain, the film zooms in on the life of a woman named Zoe (Lily James), who has struggled to find success on the modern dating scene.

On the other hand, her Muslim neighbour Kazim (Shazad Latif) is following in his parents’ footsteps and arranging a marriage with a bride from Pakistan.

Zoe, a documentary film maker, begins to follow Kazim’s approach to finding a life partner, and starts to wonder whether she is missing out.

Watching her friend’s journey opens her eyes to the perspective that there could be other routes to a happy marriage than the ones she had previously considered.

Jemima admitted that the topic of the movie was inspired by her own marriage to Imran, whom she divorced almost 20 years ago, in 2004.

Back in 2021, there was a public disagreement between herself and her ex-husband, when he suggested that “vulgarity” was responsible for the rise in rape cases.

During a televised interview in his native Pakistan, he said “vulgarity”, as well as Hindi Bollywood films, were responsible for rape, sexual violence and the “deterioration in society”.

However, Jemima hit back on social media to disagree, reflecting: “The Imran I knew used to say, ‘Put a veil on the man’s eyes not on the woman’.”

Responding to his comments that not everyone has “willpower”, she quoted a verse from the Quran: “Say to the believing men that they restrain their eyes and guard their private parts…The onus is on men.”

Meanwhile, Jemima’s interview comes after an archive of Princess Diana’s private letters, in which she expressed sorrow at her “desperate and ugly divorce”, which had left her “on my knees”, were sold last week for £161,000.

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