Mother Teresa and Princess Diana have been dead for nearly four years now - and where is their replacement for the wretched of the earth? For the halt and the lame? For the stricken and afflicted? Charity, charity, charity, Sophie! It's the primrose path to sainthood - secular or spiritual. There was such a gap in the market - why didn't you see it?
Too late now, missy. Jemima Khan's nipped in and filled it. Three pages in the Mail on Sunday: Jemima in Islamabad, desperately trying to rescue baby bear cubs from being baited with dogs in the ring. Three pages in the Sunday Telegraph: Jemima Khan on the Afghan border, singlehandedly providing 80,000 Jalozai refugees with tents and latrines. And even filing the copy herself afterwards. ("Look, even the foreigner cries for us!")
All this and a lifetime's devotion to cancer patients as well, at her hubby's cancer hospital in Lahore. The girl's a marvel. She's a Goldsmith heiress, for heaven's sake. And fabulously good-looking. Automatic upgrades, Tatler covers, dinner at the Ivy, super-A-list invites. We thought she'd lie around on divans all day being pampered like a houri after she married sexy old Imran, didn't we? Wrong, wrong. Jemima's a global friend to the friendless and her heart is bigger than an Oxfam truck.
So beyond fabulous for large-scale disaster wear, that salwar kameez, isn't it? Better than your actual Albanian nun's outfit. Clever Jemima! Women on the edge of a third world breakdown have hard wardrobe choices. Refugee camps, battle zones, bear-baiting pits on the outskirts of Islamabad - these are all very tricky photo-ops. You look ludicrously out-of-place in a power jacket and heels (Madeleine Albright, Clare Short) and barking mad, frankly, in the Woman Warrior option (Margaret Thatcher, Falklands tank, borrowed fatigues).
But the salwar kameez is perfect. The innate non-sexual modesty of the neck-to-ankle coverage says: "Forget I'm a woman, I'm only here to work," while the iconic femininity of that trailing veiling breathes, "But I'm gorgeous." Divine! It's got all the resonance of a nurse's uniform. I mean your Farewell to Arms/first world war nurses in capes and long pinnies, obviously, not those tetchy women from ER in polyester coveralls.
Even her little feet are fashionable: in tiny, sexy little strappy sandals, as worn in the schmutter capitals of the world (New York, Paris, London, Milan and - now - Islamabad). Who can forget Jemima strolling around Imran's cancer hospital in Lahore, deep in conversation with our royal Lady of the Sorrows? Both women tall, slender and fabulously photogenic; both dressed in salwar kameez with their silken dapattas floating around their glorious hair. Jemima's jim-jams (she designs them herself - is there no end to this girl's talents?) are on the restrained Calvin/Armani/Helmut Lang side of the fashion spectrum (white, cream, tan, vanilla, beige).
Jemima was very lucky with her choice of Muslim. If she'd married a Kuwaiti, she'd have had to battle with that horse's-bit contraption I keep seeing in Harvey Nicks. Not a great look. But the dappata - a 5ft-long,3ft-wide, loose veil made of translucent silk - is a very happy Pakistani compromise between Muslim modesty and sexy femininity.
It's forever sliding off, and you have to keep fiddling with it, like a Victorian deb with a fan. Watch Benazir Bhutto facing off tricky questions about governmental chicanery from some aggressive bloke. Fiddle-fiddle, waft-waft, drape-drape. The voice comes out as truculent and defensive as a Maff spokesman's on Newsnight, but the body-language says: "Ooh, kiss me once, kiss me twice, treat me nice."
And speaking of Benazir - Imran Khan's longtime enemy - what's happened to his own political aspirations? He once hoped to lead his nation himself, as he famously led it on the cricket field, but failed. Last time Pakistan had free elections (before the current military-dictatorship arrangement) Jemima accompanied him on the stump, practising her newly-acquired Hindi, as he took on both Benazir and Nawaz Sharif in a two-pronged attempt to find a woolly-headed Third Way. When the results came in, he told Jemima it was "a wipeout". How fabulous Immie!, she cried, and he had to tell her a wipeout meant NO seats, not all the seats.
Not to worry, Jemima. Politics, public relations - these are grubby places for a queen of all our hearts. Saving bears, rescuing refugees, curing cancer - that's how you'll win your place in heaven. There are few options open in public life for a woman of style, substance and staggering beauty - and the greatest of these is charity, charity, charity. Makes fabulous pictures, too.
