Yesterday, the day on which Benazir Bhutto expected to be elected back into power in Pakistan, her son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said that he intended to follow her into politics, that he would lead her party into elections in five weeks’ time, but that he wanted privacy for three years while he studied at the University of Oxford.

Sitting in his mother’s favourite small London hotel, more like a nightclub than a political stage, just 12 days after her assassination, he was asked whether he feared for his life. He replied: “I fear for my privacy more.”

There was gentle laughter, but muted by the preposterous contradiction: that Mr Bhutto Zardari, 19, is now the head of the most powerful party in a country gripped by political crisis, which has the world’s anxious attention, but he does not want anyone to photograph him except for 20 minutes, later this week, in Christ Church, his Oxford college.

Term starts on Monday and Mr Bhutto Zardari intended to arrive last night after dark, to minimise publicity. But his team said that he might go to Pakistan for the postponed elections, now set for February 18, if the Pakistan People’s Party felt it appropriate and depending on “how ugly it gets”.

The meeting, called by well-meaning family advisers to fend off the deluge of requests for interviews, was an even more unrealistic attempt at a bargain than the photoshoots on a royal skiing holiday. It was a doomed attempt to secure privacy for someone, like Prince William, who is the object of overwhelming interest – and who will court that interest in the future to carry out his role – but for the moment, wants it only at scheduled times.

The advisers had chosen as a stage for this tortuously mixed message the basement dining room of the Gore Hotel, a favourite haunt of Ms Bhutto, entirely unfit for the purpose. In the expensive but grubby white-stuccoed streets where South Kensington gives way to Gloucester Road, near the family flat where Mr Bhutto Zardari has been staying, the hotel’s main feature is its bar, dark as a nightclub, lit only by the turquoise and fairy-pink lighting behind the rows of liqueurs and cocktails. The dining room could barely fit 40 journalists and two dozen television cameras; more crowded up the crimson-papered staircase.

There was no security (other than the room being so small that it kept many out). There were no checks on identity, nor on electronic equipment, although the two Foreign and Commonwealth Office security officers who have been with Mr Bhutto Zardari since he arrived from Dubai – big men in suits – were upstairs in the hall.

Simon Walker, a likeable and ubiquitous New Zealander who has made a career out of public relations for difficult causes – previously, Buckingham Palace, and now, the unloved private equity industry – said he was chairing the meeting in a private capacity (he was at university with Ms Bhutto), and that everyone should remember that Mr Bhutto Zardari was only 19.

He looked it – or even younger. On television the day after his mother’s assassination, he looked handsome and astonishingly poised, dark-suited with thin-rimmed glasses. Yesterday, he looked shaken and quiet, most convincing when he pleaded that the attention was “a new experience for me” and that he had been at Oxford only eight weeks and would never be wise enough to go into politics if he did not finish his history degree. “One of my mother’s strengths was her education,” he said. He added that he had been dismayed by false entries created in his name on the Facebook networking website, he assumed by journalists trying to get information about his life and friends.

His mother had been an international superstar, political in every instinct, including the one that prompted her to stand up through the sunroof of her armoured car on December 27, leaving her vulnerable to the gun-and-bomb attack that killed her. In choosing Mr Bhutto Zardari, the party, which claims to stand for democracy and the poorest people, has turned to the Bhutto dynasty, not the bright managers and lawyers who ran it during her eight-year exile, avoiding corruption charges which, she said, were politically motivated.

Defending his new role against those who say that dynasty is incompatible with democracy, Mr Bhutto Zardari said: “It was recognised that at this moment of crisis, the party needed a close association with my mother through the bloodline.” He added that “politics is in my blood”, but admitted that he did not have experience, including that of living in Pakistan. Since he was 10, he was brought up in London and Dubai. “It was not my choice to live outside Pakistan when my mother was sent into exile,” he said.

Corruption charges, all denied by Ms Bhutto and her husband, were due to resurface in Swiss courts this month. Yesterday, Pakistan’s lawyer in Geneva said that it would pursue Ms Bhutto’s husband for 60 million Swiss francs, four times the amount in previous charges, a sum it says is illegally held in Swiss accounts.

At Oxford, Mr Bhutto Zardari’s security will be the responsibility of the normal college security team and Thames Valley Police, although he will not have officers assigned to him. He does not want to follow the example of some students from prominent families who have requested a burglar alarm for their rooms, a practice generally discouraged.

But his attempt to live a normal life seems doomed. It is not that he rejects the anointment as her successor but that it came too soon. He and his mother had agreed, he said, that “once I had finished my studies I would go back to Pakistan and begin campaigning. But we did hope that this day would not come as quickly as it has.”

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