She married at 52 in a dress with sheer panels, and her ex-husband's sons walked her down the aisle - he is in prison

Jemima Goldsmith married at fifty-two. For the second time. The groom is Cameron O'Reilly, a sixty-two-year-old Irish-Australian financier, and she was walked down the aisle by her sons - Sulaiman, twenty-nine, and Kasim, twenty-seven. Those two are the sons of Imran Khan, who is currently in prison in Pakistan.

If there is a wedding carrying more biography than a single day can hold, this is it.

A dress that does not apologise

An Oscar de la Renta design: a sleeveless neckline falling off the shoulders, sheer panels, a layered A-line skirt and a hem to mid-calf, beneath which white shoes with a heart-shaped heel were visible. A belt of flowers at the waist and a short veil with crystals.

This matters, and it is not fashion. A bride of fifty-two who does not hide behind a long sleeve, a closed neckline and a champagne-coloured palette - that is still a statement, in London and even more so here. The number of Macedonian weddings at which a second marriage means discreet, quiet and far from a lens is larger than we care to admit.

Thirty years of one story

In 1995 Goldsmith married Imran Khan, then Pakistan's most famous cricketer and later its prime minister. She converted to Islam and moved to Lahore. They divorced in 2004 but remained on good terms - a sentence we rarely read, and live out even more rarely.

Khan has been in prison since 2023 on corruption charges he calls politically motivated, and he has been sentenced to three years. Goldsmith and her sons publicly campaign for his release. Which means the woman who married yesterday in a white dress is at the same time campaigning for her ex-husband's release, and she does not hide it.

The Diana connection

Goldsmith was a close friend of Princess Diana. Khan made her visits to Pakistan possible in 1996 and 1997, when Diana was working on charitable campaigns there. Hasnat Khan, one of the men Diana was involved with, was a distant relative of Imran's. The two of them attended Diana's funeral in 1997.

Professionally, Goldsmith is a producer and screenwriter with around thirty hours of television for American and British channels, including the series The Crown. She and Cameron O'Reilly met through work on film and documentaries, and they have been together about a year and a half.

In 2023, for a magazine, she said something that now reads like an explanation for this whole story: "Professionally, I believe you are always proudest of what was hard for you to achieve."