Coming home to Hugh & Love, Actually

The French Riviera, Hugh Grant and an itsy-bitsy bikini may be the surest sign Imran Khan''s ex-wife is really and truly Haiqa no more.
Haiqa was the Muslim name adopted by Jemima Goldsmith nine years ago when she married the Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician. Now, Jemima has finally come out of the shadows and onto the front-pages as the woman who dares to bare.
Barely weeks after her divorce from Imran, Jemima has defiantly shed the demure salwar kameez — her uniform of holy matrimony.
More to the point, she apparently shed her inhibitions and left them on the beach as well.
For the first time in her life, she actually went the whole way for the cameras. Jemima finally allowed herself to be seen as the public squeeze of Love Actually star Hugh Grant.
It comes after months of snatched photographs of the couples'' stolen moments at London nightclubs and flash parties. But can the Haiqa-turned-Jemima moment really be classified as whiplash femi nism of another sort, decades after bra-burning empowered women took to the streets demanding the right to dare? Is this, screamed some of the trashier British tabloids, love actually, or lust actually?
How about life actually, now that Grant has reportedly taken Jemima to meet his father and been observed by telephoto lenses leaving her house the morning after the night before?
For many, Jemima, 30, a dishy blonde, fabulously rich, well-connected and quasi-iconic in her fragile femme fatale looks and bearing, is clearly the 21st century''s newest woman on top. But, on top of whom, is the question the more Biblically-minded may ask. If only it were that simple. Or that lurid. Many others believe it does not matter. Jemima''s public story began when she defied the world and the dire warnings of her famously philandering, always-shrewd millionaire father Sir James, and married Imran.
The wedding took place after a brief and blissful courtship. A mesmerised world found itself unable to look away, even as it predicted the unlikely love story was doomed from the moment it began.
And yet, Jemima was still portraying take-a-chance womanhood. It may have been an ill-advised choice of mate, but at least this was an active choice.
Cloistered, sequestered and festering or not, it was Jemima''s decision — hers to rue or rejoice in.
A fascinated world observed how at 21, Jemima seemed a pampered, positively- yielding, perennially-accommodating counterpoint to the increasingly-orthodox, aging former playboy who so amazingly won her hand in marriage. In the years that followed, two cherubic young sons later, Jemima''s life still seemed an actively-sought, carefully-maintained choice. She lived in relative hardship in Imran''s family home. She visibly struggled to overcome her shyness. She covered her head and shrouded her body. She almost but not quite walked three paces behind her straight-backed, unyielding husband. She smiled for the cameras and inquisitive journalists. And she breathed not a word about her growing alienation from Prince Charming who ultimately was derided by many as no more than a pre-modern Pathan.
Unsurprising then, the furore over this new, unaccustomed sunshine vision of a lissome blonde clad in severe black, canoodling with Grant on the silver sands of the Cote d Azur. Jemima unbound to roam where she pleases.