Imran Khan, the man who looks likely to be elected prime minister in Pakistan's general election this week, leans forward in his chair and lowers his voice.

He is about to make an extraordinary disclosure about his new wife. Later he will talk fondly of his first, the British heiress Jemima Goldsmith, a marriage that ended in divorce in 2004 after nine years; and in rather less glowing terms about his second wife, who is also British – the former BBC weather presenter Reham Khan.

He divorced her, after ten stormy months together, in 2015 – a bitter break-up that could yet cost him the premiership, thanks to her sensational allegations of adultery, drug-taking and fathering children out of wedlock.

Nevertheless, what Khan now tells me in an exclusive interview is indeed a surprise, given that with two failed marriages behind him, he must have approached the prospect of a further union with a degree of caution.

Yet when it came to his third wedding, in February this year, he says: 'I did not catch a glimpse of my wife's face until after we were married. I proposed to her without seeing her because she had never met me without her face being covered with a full veil.

Pakistani cricketer-turned-opposition leader and head of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) party Imran Khan (C) posing for a photograph with his new wife Bushra along with relatives during a nikah wedding ceremony


'The only idea I had of what she looked like came from an old photograph I had seen in her house.'

The reason, the former captain of his country's cricket team explains, is that his bride, Bushra Maneka, 39, is a leading scholar and spiritual guide in the mystic Sufi branch of Islam and she will not meet men other than her husband with her face uncovered, nor venture unveiled outside her house, which she rarely leaves.

She is a mother-of-five, and when she and Khan, 65, first met three years ago, she was still married to her first husband, a senior customs official named Khawar Fareed Maneka. When Bushra finally did remove her veil, Khan adds: 'I was not disappointed, and now I am happily married.'

Back in the 1980s, when Khan lived the life of a socialite, playing with the same energy both on the field and in London nightclubs such as Annabel's and Tramp, it would, he admits, 'have been unthinkable if someone had told me I would marry someone whose face I hadn't seen. I would have thought they were mad'.