Could Imran Khan become the next chancellor of Britain's prestigious Oxford University? The 71-year-old ex-prime minister of Pakistan, who has been languishing in Rawalpindi's Adiala prison since August 2023, has decided to apply for the honorary post held by Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong, who is close to retirement. Sayed Zulfiqar Bukhari, spokesperson for his party, the Pakistan Movement for Justice (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf), confirmed his candidacy on Sunday, August 18. The former cricket star is already an honorary fellow of Keble College at Oxford, where he studied philosophy, politics and economics in the 1970s. His two sons live in London with their mother, Jemima Goldsmith, daughter of billionaire James Goldsmith.
The reason for his candidacy was not made explicit. Does Khan want to be visible again on the international scene? Is this the prelude to a possible exile? That is not certain, as he has always maintained that he would never leave his country, unlike his predecessor, Nawaz Sharif, ousted from power in 2017, and who negotiated his departure for London, officially for health reasons, in order to get out of prison.
Defeated in 2022 by a vote of no confidence in Parliament, Khan was imprisoned after threatening the military, which he blamed for his ouster, with mass street protests. He is unlikely to be released from his cell. He is the subject of a hundred or so proceedings, and after each judicial victory, the authorities bring a new charge against him. The country's most popular man poses too serious a threat to the Sharif clan that runs the country, but also to the army. Despite the obstacles his party faced in contesting the parliamentary elections in February, voters put his candidates in the lead.
On July 13, an Islamabad court acquitted him and his third wife, Bushra Bibi, and ordered his release. However, both he and his wife remained in detention. The couple had been sentenced in the first instance to seven years in prison, accused of breaking Islamic law by not respecting the required interval between Bibi's divorce and their marriage.
In a written interview granted to British media ITV News on Tuesday, through the intermediary of his lawyers, Khan bore witness to his detention conditions. "For nearly a year now, I have been confined in a seven-by-eight-foot death cell, a space typically reserved for terrorists and those on death row. Surveillance is constant, stripping away any semblance of privacy," he said, before assuring that he was "mentally and physically prepared for the struggle ahead." "True democratic change and freedom in Pakistan were never going to be easy," he added.
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