In 1997, this was the timeline: Princess Diana was deeply in love with Dr. Hasnat Khan, who worked at a London hospital and they had been dating since 1995. While Khan adored Diana, he was realistic about how hellish life would be with her if they married and/or if they went public with their relationship. Diana made a last-ditch effort to salvage the relationship by visiting Pakistan and meeting his family (without him). They reportedly ended things in the late spring of 1997, which is why Diana was available to be wooed by Dodi al Fayed (at his father’s urging). Even while she was spending time with Dodi that summer, Diana was still thinking about Hasnat Khan and dreaming about what their life could be together. Well, Charles Spencer addressed some of that relationship in Swan Song:

Princess Diana plotted to move to South Africa with her lover Dr. Hasnat Khan in a bid to flee her “petulant” ex-husband, King Charles, her brother Charles Spencer claims in a bombshell new book. The tragic royal went as far as to speak to famed medical pioneer Dr. Christian Barnard as she hoped he could snag Khan, a British-Pakistani cardiothoracic surgeon, a post at his Cape Town hospital.

As Spencer, her youngest sibling, notes in his new memoir, “Swan Song: My Sister, Diana,” out today, his sister was “prone to naive yet impossible dreams [about how] her life could be.”

He details the chaos Diana lived in — a state of frenzy also whipped up by the stories planted about her by palace courtiers, the “men in grey suits,” as she dubbed them. Life in England, indeed, had become “intolerable” by the time she flew to visit her brother at his home in Cape Town in March 1997, he asserts.

“She had come to see for herself if this sublimely beautiful tip of Africa … could provide a haven for her and her heart surgeon lover,” he writes. “Might they, she dared hope, move there together, and carve out a life?”

Diana, whom Spencer admits was “mercurial,” dated Khan in secret for two years before they split in the summer of 1997, weeks before her death at age 36 in a car crash in Paris. She famously called him “my dishy doctor.”

The now-62-year-old Earl Spencer admits Diana had previously “scoured” Country Magazine “looking for a rural getaway” where she could live in “perfect peace” with an “earlier man in her life.” Now, he said, “in the latest of these whimsical scenarios, she hoped her new love could work at Groote Schuur Hospital, a few miles away from my Cape Town home. This was where Christian Barnard had performed the first successful human heart transplant thirty years earlier. Diana dreamed that she and her man could live happily — normally — nearby. The other side of the world seemed to offer the possibility of asylum.”

Dr. Barnard, in turn, promised that he was “busy investigating possible medical opportunities for her man. He was confidant something suitable would turn up.”

With her sons, Princes William and Harry, boarding at Eton College in the UK, the world was opening up for Diana, Spencer said. Although he spent the trip trying to shield his sister from the press, she asked to meet President Nelson Mandela, which he facilitated.

As for Khan, Spencer writes, “Diana had spent her waking hours at my home with her mobile in her hand, constantly waiting for the man in her life to call. And, to her obvious distress, he rarely had.”

The couple first met in 1995, two months before her infamous Panorama interview, when the princess was visiting Joe Toffolo, the husband of her friend Oonagh, who was having triple bypass surgery at the Royal Brompton hospital, supervised by Khan. After the visit, Diana returned to the hospital almost every day for three weeks to pursue Khan and a romance eventually began. Although it was Diana’s most serious relationship since her separation from the then Prince Charles in 1992, the relationship was kept away from prying eyes.

[From Page Six]

Once you realize that the summer with Dodi was Diana’s attempt to make Khan jealous, doesn’t that make the whole thing even sadder? Like… Diana wasn’t even with the man she really loved. Diana still yearned for Hasnat Khan. As for Diana’s dream of possibly moving to South Africa, it sounds like something she would have fantasized about. The other fantasy was moving to Malibu and basing herself in California for most of the year.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images.