It is not easy to get to Imran Khan. I meet his political agent at the 1970s government buildings in Islamabad where he has an airless basement office. We hail a cab and point it in the direction of the hills outside the city, the lowest foothills of the distant Himalayas. The tarmac soon ends and the gradient gets much steeper. There is a bridge over a dried-up gorge, where the river has been dammed further upstream. Young men and boys are laying water pipes beside the rough dirt road in the hundred-degree late afternoon heat. The road gets more precipitous still and our driver gets out to pour a bottle of mineral water over his engine. Eventually at the ridge of a hill with a view across the city with its minarets and half-finished housing projects we reach a set of unlikely electronic gates.
Imran bought these 35 acres four years ago and has built his house in the middle of them. The original plan was to move in here with his family - wife Jemima and their two boys - but as it has turned out he lives up here alone. He waves me through a cool courtyard and into a simply furnished sitting room, with big wooden doors open to the hills. He then sits on a sofa, wearing his sunglasses, and sends texts on three mobile phones, struggling for a signal. He does not speak for five or 10 minutes.
When he eventually looks up, still wearing his shades, and motions me with his hand to begin, I ask him why he chose to be out here in the wild.
He says he always wanted to live on a farm because he grew up right on the edge of town in Lahore. There were only about eight houses, all family, and there was a big open space in the middle where the boys learned to play cricket (two of Imran's cousins, Javed Burki and Majid Khan, also captained Pakistan). 'We all had our cows and our buffaloes,' he recalls, 'we grew our own vegetables. You could swim in the canal it was so clean.'
This golden time was eclipsed by the population explosion in Lahore. It grew so rapidly that suddenly the family were in the middle of town. Imran could not bear the pollution and the noise. He never liked city life. He loved mountains. From where he is now it is only an hour or so to the Himalaya proper and you can quickly be at seven or eight thousand feet. His parents or his uncle used to take him up in the hills each summer as a boy and now he takes his own sons when they come over from London for the school holidays, hiking and shooting partridge.
'This place was just a jungle area when I found it,' he says. 'It was very cheap.' Since he moved in, because he moved in, the land has gone up '20 times'. 'I sold my London flat to buy this whole place and build this house.' He loves the fact of his isolation. 'I have fruit trees. Cows for fresh milk, yoghurt. My own wheat. I'm basically self-sufficient. I have made my boys a little cricket ground.'
The house seems to suit Imran's idea of himself. He has always set himself apart. These days, it also seems to symbolise his place in Pakistani politics, which have engaged him now for a decade. He set up his Justice Party in 1996 on an anticorruption platform with some hope of real power. Ten years on, he remains the party's sole member of parliament, often a lone critical voice against the military regime of General Musharraf.
Imran keeps no memories of his cricketing days in the house. He has auctioned every last ball and glove off for the cancer hospital he established in Lahore in memory of his mother. His boys, Sulaiman and Qasim, now 10 and seven, who got into cricket during the Ashes last summer, are sad, he admits, that their dad does not have more to show them from the days when he terrorised the world's best batsmen and bowlers; when he took 300 wickets in his first 60 Test matches; when, in 1987, he became the first Pakistan captain to win a Test series in England. I wonder if his boys support England or Pakistan, Freddie or Shoaib?
'Pakistan for cricket, England for football,' he says. He has not given any thought to whether he would like them to follow in his footsteps and play for Pakistan (or England) one day, though their mother Jemima, the daughter of buccaneering billionaire Sir James Goldsmith whom he married in 1995 and separated from nine years later, is often phoning when they are here, wondering if he thinks they are any good. And are they?
'I always tell her it is simply too early to know,' he says.
Cricket is his past; the present and the future are all about politics. Over the past 10 years, he says, he has been invited to be Prime Minister under Musharraf and to be Deputy Prime Minister by Nawaz Sharif, the civilian PM overthrown by the general. He refused on both occasions because he did not want to be tainted by corruption. Instead he has established a power base of sorts in a constituency three hours west of Islamabad, bordering the wild North West Frontier, where his tribal Pathan roots originate. Not long after his cricket career ended Imran visited those tribal homelands for the first time to write a book about the warrior race of which he is a distant cousin. The book is punctuated with pictures of him engaging in shooting competitions with the tribal elders, dressed in full headgear.
'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.'
The next election is scheduled for 2007. How does he aim to change things?
'My contention now is that there is no way anyone should fight an election while Musharraf is in charge,' he says. 'Therefore I will be out on the streets beginning in September against him. It is the only way. I am preparing my party for a street movement. What we are hoping is that the other parties will come out too.'
How many people does he imagine will join him in this popular unrest? Hundreds, thousands, millions?
'Well,' he says, in his rolling bass voice, 'if no one else comes, at least we will be protesting. A few thousand people in every city at least.'
Is there anyone he would not march with, the far-right fundamentalists (with whom he has recently voted on particular issues), perhaps? 'The pseudo-liberals here will tell the West: save us or the mullahs are coming; that is not the problem. You will have no problem with extremists in Pakistan if you have democracy.'
Taking his politics to the streets will obviously increase his personal risk. Imran has always refused to have bodyguards, seeing them as a sign of weakness. Three - ornamental - shotguns hang over his fireplace.
'I have no fear of death,' he says. 'When I came into politics I always thought there was a possibility I would be killed.' If anything his lack of fear has grown along with his faith in Islam. 'Spirituality does two things for you. One, you are forced to become more selfless, two, you trust to providence. The opposite of a spiritual man is a materialist. If I was a materialist I would be making lots of money doing endorsements, doing cricket commentary. I have no interest in that.'
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.'
But, I say, he always seemed to be having such a splendid time.
He very nearly smiles. 'I was a bachelor,' he says. 'I decided I would never marry while I was playing cricket. I watched other cricketers and saw the wives going through a torrid time, and the children, which was even worse. When I had my children I was completely hands on. My marriage was tough, but I still think the highs I got in marriage were much greater than those I got as a bachelor.'
Would he like to marry again?
'One day, but not now.'
He had a reputation, as captain of Sussex, for never being one of the boys. Why was that?
'The thing was, I hated pubs,' he says. 'I could not tell you how much I detested them. I had been playing cricket for six hours body and soul and the last thing I wanted to do was stand in an English pub and talk about it. I hated the smell of a pub. I hated the look of it. And of course I never drank alcohol. So maybe that was part of it.'
The other reason, he says, was an extreme kind of shyness. It is hard to imagine the great allrounder as a retiring type, but he insists he was.
'My oldest son is very shy now and he reminds me of myself. I would deliberately miss public occasions if there might be a speech. When I became Pakistan captain in 1982 I could not even address the team. I would tell my manager, "Look, this is what I want to convey, can you tell them for me?"'
He began to escape this predicament, he says, in his mid-thirties, when he found something like personal enlightenment. 'I underwent a bit of a quest, as we all do. I asked myself, " What am I doing on this earth?" I was very fortunate in that when I was asking this question I came across very deep spiritual people. That happens in Pakistan. It does not happen so often in the West.'
Along with his growing faith, Imran rethought a lot of his views on social issues, such as the place of women in society. He tries to tread a line in his political life between an appeal to the faithful and an attempt not to undermine his charismatic credibility in the West. He puts his argument for a woman's place being in the home in cultural terms.
'I always think that one of the biggest mistakes made by the feminist movement is that they have devalued motherhood,' he says. 'My father was in business and away a lot when I was a child; my mother was all-powerful. The unconditional love, the security it gives you in life is irreplaceable. In England I saw that the side-effect of this feminism was that children lost out on this incredible education and security, which no one else can provide.'
It was watching his mother die an awful death of cancer, unable to get treatment or even pain relief in Pakistan, that drove him to his proudest achievement, a $25m cancer hospital named in her honour in Lahore. He raised the money through campaigns and donations.
He started with Pakistan's richest men , many of whom had gone to his school, but quickly realised that generosity had nothing to do with wealth. So he went to the public: he enlisted the help of a small army of children - even though to start with he was terrified to stand up in front of a school assembly. 'In the end,' he says , 'I needed $4m in six weeks. I got an open jeep, put a big sack for money on the back and toured from north to south asking for help. I started at seven in the morning and carried on till midnight. In those six weeks I changed. I realised the generosity of tea boys, taxi drivers, the poorest people bringing 10 rupee notes - and also their faith. I was saying, "Don't worry: save your money". And they said, "We are not doing it for you, we are doing it for our God".'
The hospital, with 75 per cent free care, remains a beacon in Pakistan. It came, you guess, at a great cost to him, though. It was at the time that the hospital opened that he married 22-year-old Jemima Goldsmith and brought her to Lahore to live in an apartment that, Vanity Fair pointed out, shocked, had dodgy electrics and no washing machine. Having given all of his time and most of his money to the hospital he was virtually drained. Inevitably, particularly given his views on the role of a wife, the marriage suffered almost from the start. Does he look back on it now as an impossible match?
'Well it was far more brave of her than it was of me,' he says, finally removing his sunglasses and rubbing his eyes a little wearily. 'But that is what endeared her to me. I always thought I would marry a Pakistani girl just because it would be so difficult for a girl to come here. To try to balance everything was certainly the hardest thing I ever did. The hospital opened, I was involved in politics and then kids came. I had known pressure on the cricket field, but that sort of pressure was very new to me. And though she tried for a long time, it was very difficult for Jemima to live that life.'
Was the divorce a mutual decision?
'For one-and-a-half years she was in England and I was here. She felt she could not live here, there was increasing difficulty, and I could not be anywhere but here. I am rooted to a cause. I hated the divorce and the last thing I wanted was for my children to grow up without me. I would like the boys to be Pakistani as much as they are English. And they are Muslims; I take them to Friday prayers as often as I can.'
How does he feel about Hugh Grant's role in their life, I wonder ? Are they on good terms? 'Well I hardly go to England at all,' he says, by way of an answer. 'But the boys are fine.' He puts his shades back on. 'There is never really a positive side to these things but, if there is, at least being alone allows me to be more fearless.'
Where does he place his hope?
'A lot of people here in the press call me naive,' he says. 'Musharraf told them I was his prime ministerial candidate in 2002 but had turned him down, I was too full of myself. He said I was a terrorist without a beard. But I would have failed if I had joined them. Look at the way they live: big palaces, Lear jets. People here have no drinking water; 70 per cent of the schools are closed in my constituency. But I'm more hopeful than ever. One of the reasons I was a successful cricketer was I felt nothing was impossible. I never signed more than a one-year contract, because I always thought I would be better the next year. I feel that now, too.'
I ask him if there was one match out of his long career that, on quiet nights up here, he replays in his head. He says that he thinks of nostalgia as a disease, but if pressed he suggests not the World Cup win of 1992 when Pakistan beat England - he does not view one-day cricket as proper cricket - but the winning tour of the West Indies in 1988.
'It was the first time anyone had won a series there in 15 years. I had retired and General Zia, the president, personally asked me to come back. I was 35 and not very fit, we had quite a weak team and then I got 11 wickets in the first Test. That was the last time I really bowled well.'
I wonder whether he recalled any particular moments against England? The Test matches then often seemed to be full of bad feeling. 'No, in my time you really tested yourself against the West Indians,' he says. 'Viv Richards was the greatest player around. Like him, I lost interest against lesser teams. Once New Zealand toured here and Richard Hadlee did not come , so I refused to play. I could not motivate myself against lesser players.'
He had a long-standing and bitter rivalry with Ian Botham, triggered apparently by Botham once remarking that he would not even send his mother-in- law to Pakistan for the winter. It culminated in 1996 when Botham and Allan Lamb sued Imran unsuccessfully for libel after he accused them in a newspaper column of racism and ball-tampering. Does he still feel animosity towards Botham?
He is, like any decent politician, non-committal, while making his feelings clear. 'I was a rival with Botham because he was a competing all-rounder. But he was someone who I don't think ever did justice to his talent. When he started he could have done anything, but he declined very quickly. In a way our careers were the opposite of each other. I started quite slowly but got better, maximised my talent. He went the other way, I think.'
Like any great all-rounder, Imran still likes the idea of a single man carrying a team. 'I don't watch too much cricket but I like to look at Flintoff,' he says. 'He's the reason for England's revival. He can win a match as batsman or bowler; that's still rare.'
What about Pakistan, can he see them winning in England as his team did 19 years ago?
'We have some players,' he says, 'But we have no structure here. It is the same story. Musharraf appoints the head of the cricket board. So he becomes a mini-Musharraf. There is no accountability and therefore nothing improves.'
I wonder if the buzz he gets from politics replaces the one he used to get from taking a big wicket.
'It's not that type of adrenaline,' he says. 'But it is so unpredictable here that there is always some excitement.'
He had graphic evidence of this recently when, during the visit of George Bush to Pakistan in March, he was placed under house arrest having threatened to organise a protest against the President's implicit support for dictatorship in Pakistan. He was picked up in a restaurant in Islamabad and brought up here, locked in his home.
I suggest to him that it is a little like Brer Rabbit being thrown in the briar patch, not the worst form of punishment he could imagine. He laughs for the first time. 'It's true,' he says. 'I love the silence here. People say, "Don't you get scared in this house with nothing all around?" But I pray to be here.'
And then he gets up and sees me out, and I leave him, alone on his hill.
The writer tweets @ISIStinger
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