London Diary: Is Pakistan plotting to kill Imran Khan?

Imran Khan’s two sons from his first marriage to Jemimah Goldsmith have accused Pakistan of trying to kill their father and pass it off as a natural death.Sulaiman (29) and Kasim (27) have urged the UK government to intervene. 

Khan has been held in solitary confinement in a Rawalpindi jail since 2023. His lawyers say his health has deteriorated recently due to harsh prison conditions.  

“Multiple prisoners have died of hepatitis due to the poor conditions in there and the tools they use to treat people,” said Kasim. Asked what he dreaded, he replied: “An assassination.” 

Sulaiman ruled out his father striking a deal to secure his freedom by stepping down from politics: “I imagine he’s been offered various deals [like] house arrest or exile as long as he stays silent... But I don’t think he would accept.”  

Their maternal uncle and former Conservative minister Zac Goldsmith has described the Commonwealth as a “disgrace” after it rejected his calls to pressure Pakistan over its treatment of Imran Khan.  

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Can Andy Burnham walk the talk?

The ‘silly’ season in Britain is finally over and Parliament is back in action after the summer recess with a new broom — Prime Minister Andy Burnham. 

Like his predecessors, he has pledged to take Britain away from the ‘over-centralised’ political control and misguided privatisation of the Thatcher era towards a more prosperous, progressive and happy nation. 

The new regime’s two catch phrases are political and economic power to local governments and taking essential services back under public control.  

Burnham spent the summer touring the country and promising to help people with the rising cost of living.  But again, like his predecessors, he is discovering the ‘limits placed on those ambitions by the towering level of Britain’s debt and [the] parlous state of public finances’, as The Times put it. 

Like those before him discovered the hard way, delivering on promises is much harder than minting smart sound bytes.

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Journalist or spy? 

The line between journalism and intelligence-gathering has always been somewhat blurred. Foreign correspondents posted in hostile countries unwittingly end up doing the secret services’ job — often with the tacit approval of editors. 

Their sources, of course, innocently believe that they’re talking to a genuine reporter. Readers are similarly duped into believing that they are reading authentic journalism. 

The well-known British-Indian journalist Shyam Bhatia, who worked as The Observer’s West Asia correspondent for many years, has written a novel titled The Quiet Correspondent around this theme, which he says is even more relevant today in an era of “disinformation and deep-state manipulation”. 

Its protagonist Amol Batty is a war reporter who discovers secrets that powerful governments would rather keep buried and, in the process, finds himself used by his country’s intelligence agency.  

Bhatia denies that the novel is autobiographical. Guess we’ll have to take his word for it. 

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Stuck with dead book stock? Call AI 

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been accused of sounding the death-knell of literature by stealing literary works to train robots or so-called ‘learning models’. But for many publishers stuck with dead stock of unsold books, it’s proving to be a boon. The greed of learning models for new material has triggered a massive uptick in the sales of hitherto unsellable books. 

According to the Camden New Journal (CNJ), bulk shipments of unlikely titles like The Nootkan Indian: A Pictorial by John Sendey (1977) and A Biographical Dictionary of Jersey: Volume 2 by Francis L.M. Corbet (1988) have been flying out of Walden Books after decades on the shelves.

David Tobin, owner this small independent bookshop in the London suburb of Camden, says his store was weighed down by mile-high piles of unsold books. “It all seemed to happen at once about two or three months ago,” he told CNJ. “We send [the books] to a forwarding agent in Canada, just over the American border near Detroit. They then forward them on; they have some sort of nondisclosure agreement. They won’t tell us where they go.” 

One of these orders, he said, consisted of more books than he sells in a week, including some he’s had for 25 years that were so obscure even the charity shops wouldn’t take them. 

To feed the AI engines, books are stripped off their spines and the pages fed to a machine that reads the whole thing in seconds, banks the words to aid future ‘literary production’ and cultural psychopathy, then discards the original physical texts.  

Purists may be upset, but those getting rid of unwanted baggage aren’t exactly complaining.

And finally, a London-based Vodafone customer was taken aback by a security question asked by a woman from the company’s India call centre.  

“Who was your first lover?” she asked. 

He had no recollection of ever having answered this rather personal question when he signed up for the service back in 2013. “I imagine the original questions was more like ‘who was your first girlfriend or boyfriend?’ or ‘who was the first person you kissed?’ which somehow got lost in translation!”