Petra Khashoggi weds and hasn't seen father Jonathan Aitken in years

Jonathan Aitken’s lovechild marries in secret without inviting ANY of his family… OR her own mother: Petra Khashoggi, who found at 18 she was the disgraced Tory’s daughter, reveals her turbulent emotional journey as she ties the knot with dashing fiancé

• Petra Khashoggi discovered her father was ex-minister Jonathan Aitken at 18
• She married Danny Baker Jr, 44, the son of one New York’s best plastic surgeons
• Petra’s mother, 70s beauty Soraya Khashoggi, and father weren’t at the wedding
• Mr Aitken congratulated her by email and she exchanged a texts with her mother

When Petra Khashoggi married ‘the love of my life’ — dashing man-about-Manhattan Danny Baker Jr — ten days ago, she wore a white linen beach dress, a dazzling smile, carried a bunch of pink and white flowers and . . . well, that was about it.

The civil ceremony lasted ‘less than five minutes’. There was no reception, no wedding cake and no dad to give her away.

In fact, Petra reveals, her father Jonathan Aitken — the former Cabinet minister who fell from grace shortly after taking a DNA test which proved she was his daughter — has not even met his son-in-law.

Such is their ‘distant’ relationship these days, when Aitken was told Petra had married he congratulated her by email not phone. As for her mother, the 1970s beauty Soraya Khashoggi, they’ve exchanged texts.

‘I would say that my relationship with both my mother and my father is distant,’ Petra tells me. ‘The truth is I’ve been very much on my own in this world. I had many advantages — but it was not the privileged life that people perceived.’

Petra chooses her words carefully. She was 18 when she discovered that Jonathan Aitken was her biological father rather than the late, flamboyant billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi who had raised her as his own.

Well matched: Petra Khashoggi (right) and Danny Baker Jr (left) on their wedding day

Petra was 18 when she learned her real father was ex-minister Conservative Jonathan Aitken Pictured: Petra Khashoggi with her father Mr Aitken in 2005

Today, she is wondrously happy with her gorgeous 44-year-old husband. She feels thoroughly loved but concedes she has ‘struggled with trust and safety because there was a lot of inconsistency and confusion in my upbringing’.

‘I was in a serious depression for quite some time,’ she reveals with disarming honesty. ‘A three-year relationship had just ended badly and a lot of things seemed to happen at once.

‘I had a great disappointment with a book I’d been working on for five years, I was in a horrible job, my first father Adnan had died and things became very difficult among family members — that happens a lot — but he was the glue that held us together.

‘When Humphrey [her 15-year-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel] also died, it felt like there wasn’t much good in my life. I did start to question, “What am I doing here?” It was a very dark time, completely overwhelming. I felt I was never going to find freedom and peace of mind.

‘There were very few people who were there for me. I was surprised, particularly within my family, by the lack of emotional support. I always believe that family should stick together, love and support each other. The root of my sadness was to do with the broken relationships in my family.

‘I shut down and became very isolated. The depression was relentless. It felt like the struggle was never going to end. I can understand why people choose to take their lives.

‘Salman Rushdie, who’s a great friend of mine, was one of the few people who regularly checked in on me. He understands the human condition. He is not afraid of the darkness.’ She pauses for a moment and looks truly sad. ‘We were supposed to meet for a drink the week that it happened,’ she says, referring to the brutal attack on the writer’s life.

‘I was in touch with his son yesterday. He is slowly progressing. I’m just so relieved he’s alive.’

Petra is a sensitive soul. You know she cares deeply about those she loves. When a DNA test revealed the truth about her biological father, she was over the moon to be welcomed into a family that included his twin daughters Victoria and Alexandra, who were just a month older than her, and his son William.

But, she now reveals, she hasn’t seen her half-sisters since their grandmother’s funeral in 2005, or her father Jonathan — who was so delighted to acknowledge her as his daughter before he served seven months in jail for perjury — for almost five years.

‘We email each other and, occasionally, we’ll speak on the phone but I wouldn’t describe our relationship as close,’ she says.

It was Atiken’s twin daughters who had suggested to him that Petra could be his daughter on account of their strikingly similar looks.

‘It was actually the girls who were saying, ‘Do you think she might be your long-lost daughter because she doesn’t know who her father is and everybody thinks we look similar?’

He said ‘No’ to begin with because he and my mother had a relationship in the Seventies but they broke up. Then they had one fateful night — which he’d forgotten about — and that was the night I was conceived.

‘After he met me the second time [as a friend of the twins], I think it was his idea for us to get a DNA test. I think he felt sorry for me that I didn’t know who my father was and thought there was a likelihood it could be him.

‘He even said to me, before the DNA test, ‘If the results don’t come out positive, I’d love to be a father figure in your life.’ He was very kind to me at that time.’

Close resemblance: Petra, centre, with her half-sisters, twins Victoria and Alexandra

Such is their ‘distant’ relationship these days, when Aitken (pictured) was told Petra had married he congratulated her by email not phone

The Khashoggis’ divorce in 1980 — the year Petra was born — was at first acrimonious. However, Soraya and Adnan soon forged a friendship for the sake of their family. ‘I loved Adnan very much. He always treated me like one of his own. But as a young child, my older siblings were calling him Baba and I was told to call him Uncle Adnan. I was so confused.

‘At school the girls would asked me, ‘Well, who is your father?’ I just didn’t have the answers.

‘When I first joined Jonathan’s family, I was lovingly welcomed. I am still very close to William but with the girls, I don’t know. I think they felt our father was paying me a little too much attention at first but that changed after he came out of prison and reconnected with his wife Elizabeth. I certainly don’t harbour any ill feeling towards them but we’re just not really in each other’s lives.

‘I haven’t seen Jonathan since he became a priest in 2018. He’s actually on holiday in Spain at the moment so he’s not contactable. We emailed [after the wedding] and he sent his love — and he gave a nice quote to the newspaper.’

She smiles a sort of brave, it’s-the-way-things-are smile, but, you know, there is also pain. ‘My mother wrote me a text just saying, ‘congratulations’ which was nice of her and that was that. But, it wasn’t just my mother who wasn’t at our wedding. Danny’s parents weren’t there either. Nobody was invited.

‘We really wanted to get married but we wanted it to be about us. We saved breaking the news to our mothers until the day after. You know how mothers can be. We just thought it would be easier if we told them after the fact. My mother is an extraordinary woman. She’s a survivor. I admire her for that.’

Petra last saw her mother, who lives in London, two-and-a-half years ago when she joined her in New York for Christmas.

‘I was brought up by nannies — lots of different nannies — so my mother was absent at times during my childhood when I needed her. It was only when I went to my first boarding school, which was also a day school, that I actually saw what the other children’s lives were like.

‘I was the youngest boarder in the school so would have to watch all the girls in my class getting picked up by their parents every afternoon.’

She was so desperate for a sense of belonging that, in her teens and early 20s, she dyed her naturally blonde hair dark. ‘I wanted to look a little bit more like my other family members who had black hair and olive skin,’ she says.

Petra moved to the U.S. 11 years ago where she soon changed her name from Petrina to Petra and began ‘working all sorts of jobs’ that included an art gallery, a dog hotel, maitre d’ at Los Angeles’s swish Chateau Marmont hotel and a substitute teacher at the Montessori School in New York.

The late, flamboyant billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi (pictured centre with then-wife Soraya in 1999) had raised Petra her as his own

Petra exchanged texts with her mother, the 1970s beauty Soraya Khashoggi (pictured in 1970) after she got married

Today, she is a writer. ‘People always assume I’ve been taken care of [financially] but I’ve taken care of myself and always have done since the day I left home.’

Hang on Petra. Wasn’t there a trust fund or fancy flat funded by your assumed father, Adnan. After all, during his lifetime the colourful arms dealer was thought to be the world’s richest man?

‘No, not a thing,’ she says. ‘I’ve been very much on my own in this life and that’s OK.’

Petra, a former model who at 42 has the beauty of a woman a decade younger, slipped away with Danny, the son of New York’s most acclaimed plastic surgeon Daniel Baker, to the Hamptons to marry secretly with only two witnesses, Danny’s sister Lily and her husband James, present.

After the civil ceremony at Southampton Town Hall, Petra says: ‘we just got in the car and drove to Sunset Beach for our mini-moon’.

She has returned to the New York apartment she shares with Danny following that ‘mini-moon’ when we speak. She looks radiant, particularly when her husband, a friend from many years before with whom she ‘reconnected’ during lockdown, joins her on the sofa. His protectiveness to her is tangible.

She tells me that as a child she thought, ‘I’ll be married with children in my 20s. Sometimes, life is just not the way you think it’s going to be. But it always works out the way it’s meant to.

‘Funnily enough, I met Danny before I even met my father. It was the same year, 1998. Danny was a friend of one of my older brothers (she has 17 step- and half-siblings) and I met him that summer. Six months later, I met Jonathan. He hasn’t met Danny but I’ve actually known him longer than I’ve known my own father.

‘I’ll tell you how we got engaged because that was the moment I just knew there was nobody else who I could ever imagine being with,’ she says, her face aglow.

‘It was this past Christmas. I always find Christmas, as most people do, a very difficult time of year. You know, you’re going into the winter and families and all of that, so I had the Christmas blues. Danny could see I was down in the dumps that day so he started playing a silly game with me and made me laugh so much. I just looked at him and couldn’t believe I had gone from feeling so low to just laughing my head off.

‘I thought, ‘I can’t ever imagine being with anyone who makes me feel as happy as this’ and it was spontaneous. The words literally flew out of my mouth. I said, ‘I have to ask you a question. Will you marry me?’ His response was ‘absolutely’.

‘So it was this very sweet, unplanned moment — like our actual wedding. After we got engaged, everyone was asking, ‘When’s the wedding? Where is it?’ It started to feel very stressful and complicated. It just felt like it was becoming about other people.

‘We’d applied for the marriage licence and literally ten days before our wedding day we both said, ‘Why don’t we just go to Southampton Town Hall — Danny grew up in Southampton — go for it and not invite anybody. We asked his sister if she would mind being our witness because she was out there with us and James her husband came, too. We had lunch together afterwards. It was a wonderful day — absolutely glorious.’

Petra is so happy you can’t help but be happy with her.

‘We talk about what would have happened if we’d got together earlier because we were both single at a certain point in 2007 after he’d broken up with Sophie Dahl and I’d broken up with Eddie Spencer-Churchill. We’re kind of undecided.

‘We talk about what would have happened if we’d got together earlier because we were both single at a certain point in 2007 after he’d broken up with Sophie Dahl (pictured left with Jamie Cullum) and I’d broken up with Eddie Spencer-Churchill (pictured right with the late Annabelle Neilson in 2008). We’re kind of undecided,’ said Petra

‘We feel like if we had got together sooner we would have saved ourselves a lot of suffering, but who knows? Maybe it wouldn’t have worked out because of the timing. It’s hard to say. I think I needed to go on my healing journey in order to be ready for the most significant relationship of my life. I might well have screwed things up earlier on.’

Petra’s ‘journey’ has included years of therapy, time in rehab, a trip to the Amazon to the sacred land of the Siekopai tribe where she experimented with jungle drug ayahuasca which she writes about eloquently in Perspective magazine and the solitude of lockdown.

‘I got a message on Instagram from Danny. I hadn’t seen or heard from him in about 15 years. He reached out to me and shared a photograph from our days in St Tropez. We started messaging back and forth.

‘We met up two days after my 40th birthday [in July]. We went to a Greek restaurant in Manhattan. I think we were both very cautious about jumping into something, especially as we both had history.

‘After a few weeks we decided to take it to the next level and have barely spent a night apart since.

‘Danny and I are each other’s family. Neither of us are desperate for a child. We’re certainly going to try but we’re not stuck on the idea. A marriage in your 40s is different to a marriage in your 20s or 30s. We’re so happy with each other and the fact we got together later in life. Whether we have a child or have dogs, we will always have each other. It’s like we’ve found a safe harbour. Who knows what the future holds.’

Will they celebrate their marriage? ‘Yes, and everyone will be invited, but for now we just want to enjoy being married. We’re both looking forward to having a simple, peaceful life.’

Without the complications of families? ‘Exactly,’ she says with that dazzling smile. ‘This is our time.’

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