Nadhim Zahawi learnt from a young age to be careful with words. He grew up in Baghdad under Saddam Hussein’s police state, run by the Ba’ath Party. Every morning, as he and his sister packed their school bags, their mother would remind them not to tell anyone “what we talk about at home around the supper table”.
The Ba’athist model was based on that of the East German Stasi. “Teachers were recruited,” he recalls. “They would ask you, primary school children, ‘What did you discuss last night with your parents?’ To report back to the state. And that’s how they’d try to thwart, squash, kill, murder dissent.” As Kurds, the Zahawis were viewed with particular suspicion.
Perhaps in the circumstances, then, one can forgive the Education Secretary for sounding reasonably calm about his impending run-in with British school teachers, who are threatening to strike in the autumn if their wages don’t rise enough. Zahawi has offered new teachers a 9 per cent pay rise and existing teachers in England 5 per cent – but asks them to “be fair” and warns “parents will be incredibly angry” if they strike.
In the face of the Government’s crushing by-election defeats last week, he admits the situation is “incredibly difficult” but claims that there is a way out of the Conservatives’ problems if they “focus on delivery, as we did with the vaccine” and if they can demonstrate “stewardship of the economy” and “bring taxes down” before the next election.
He counsels his colleagues not to make a last-ditch attempt to unseat the Prime Minister: “We’ve got to set aside the current months of distraction and focus the whole Cabinet on operational delivery.”
There is no doubt that Zahawi is popular among Tories. He has risen steadily to second place on Conservative Home’s Cabinet league table, behind only Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, and his name comes up quickly in Westminster discussions of who should succeed Johnson. He is not aligned with any Tory faction, and it’s hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about him. As one fan puts it: “I think he could finally break the rule that no bald man is ever elected Prime Minister.”
I ask Zahawi if he wants the job. He claims that he isn’t running for leader because “there is no vacancy” and “we’ve got to pull together”. But according to two sources, Mark Fullbrook, the campaign guru who helped Johnson win the leadership and election in 2019, has quietly indicated that he will run Zahawi’s campaign.
I ask him why he is working with Fullbrook if he isn’t mulling a leadership bid. There is a pause, then Zahawi starts spluttering. “I’ve known Mark for decades,” he says. “Mark and… and Lynton [Crosby, the political strategist] work with… with Boris Johnson… he’s one of my oldest friends.” His discomfort is oddly endearing.
The young Zahawi could hardly have dreamt of being in this position. He moved here aged 11 without knowing a word of English. His father, an entrepreneur, had already fled Iraq after being warned he was about to be arrested. Zahawi recently told a podcast about the heart-stopping moment when a truckful of soldiers drove up to the plane his father was on before it left the tarmac. They went inside and – he never knew why – arrested someone else instead.
Rumours about his father being a “Western spy” spread quickly at school and six months later, his mother, a dentist, brought the children to the UK. Zahawi’s first impressions were of the cold, greyness and icy pavements.
“My sister and I would hold hands to stop us slipping and I remember that first week both of us falling,” he says. “You try to hide the tears and get up and keep walking and get to the school door. You can’t speak English at all. It was pretty horrific.”
The other children sensed his weakness. He spent a miserable period at Holland Park School in west London, being “the boy hiding in the back of the class trying to string words together” and, outside of school, being chased around the park by three bigger lads and dunked in the pond head-first whenever they caught him: “I was the bait.”
Mercifully, his parents switched him to private school, he learnt English and discovered he could talk to his teachers without fear. “I learnt that if I was able to speak the language and communicate to my teachers my fears, anxieties and my ambitions, then loads of people will help you in this great country,” he says. “When you grow up in a state where there is no freedom, you really do cherish the freedoms that we have.”
He was not political as a boy, however. He spent his time following football, studying maths and science, and mastering his nemesis, the ice, by skating. He also learnt to ride. “The moment I saw the horse, the pony, I just fell in love,” he says. He began to train seriously, learning to showjump, and wanted at one point to buy a livery stables instead of going to university. But his education-focused mother quickly put the kibosh on that idea.
At any rate, when he was 18, his father bet the family fortune, including their house, on a risky business idea and went bankrupt. Zahawi considered taking a job as a cab driver to support them. But his mother would not hear of it. She pawned her jewellery and he went to University College London to study chemical engineering. It was there that he first encountered politics.
Once again, it began with a bully. “I was a very thin 18-year-old, about a third of the size of what I am now, with big frizzy hair,” Zahawi recalls. One day during freshers’ week, he was walking into the student union building when a burly fellow tried to shove a copy of the Socialist Worker magazine into his hands. Zahawi declined – and the man became belligerent.
This time, however, he resolved not to suffer the bully alone. “I was so offended that I just thought I’m going to go and find out what the other side thinks,” he says. So he walked inside and signed up to the Conservative Collegiate Forum. “They just looked reasonable and actually they were very pleasant and talked about things like opportunity and freedom – stuff that resonated with me,” he says. “I just thought, ‘those are my values’.”
His experiences left him with an abiding distrust of the hard Left, what he calls “the Corbynista wing of the Labour Party”.
“There are elements of the hard Left whose currency, whose politics is to dehumanise their opponents, Conservatives, right-of-centre-thinking people, and to shut down debate,” he says.
Not long after university, working in marketing after an unsuccessful venture of his own selling Teletubbies merchandise, he found himself on the doorstep of Jeffrey Archer’s penthouse flat. He was there to raise money for a charity to support Kurdish victims of the first Gulf War, a project that later became embroiled in controversy over Archer’s alleged exaggerated claims about its fundraising. Archer took Zahawi and his friend, the interior designer Broosk Saib, under his wing, nicknaming them “lemon Kurd” and “bean Kurd”, and in 1994 helped Zahawi win a seat as a councillor in Wandsworth – where he quickly earned a reputation as a man who could get things done.
In 2004, he married his friend Saib’s sister, Lana. I ask how he won her hand and he grins.
“How did I persuade her? With that goofy smile,” he jokes. They have twin step-sons aged 25, both graduates of Princeton in the US, and a nine-year-old daughter. Unlike many politician’s families, however, the Zahawi wife and children hardly ever appear on the campaign trail or their father’s Instagram account.
In 1997, Zahawi volunteered to work on Archer’s mayoral campaign alongside a posse of aspiring politicians that included Priti Patel, Sajid Javid, Kwasi Kwarteng and Stephan Shakespeare. But when Archer quit the race over perjury allegations, the gang was left adrift. One day, Shakespeare and Zahawi met up in a greasy spoon to kick around ideas for a business project that would use a new-fangled technology called the internet to collect data. The resulting company, leading market researchers YouGov, is now a multinational British success story worth more than £1 billion.
This from the group trying to clamp down on protests.
Won’t someone please think of the poor oppressed people who hold all the power.
>Nadhim Zahawi learnt from a young age to be careful with words.
then we get
>“There are elements of the hard Left whose currency, whose politics is to dehumanise their opponents, Conservatives, right-of-centre-thinking people, and to shut down debate,” he says.
Someone should introduce him to that Mitchell and Webb sketch.
For a guy who regurlarly gaslights the nation for his dear leader he doesn’t seem to have a clue that he is one of those shits he is so out to say within the article that he is against.
There is no debate. These right wing Tory asshats love to hide behind etiquette and ‘rational debate’ when every decision is a callus bearly concealed stab at the poor. Legitimate outrage at the actions of a party that has nothing, nothing but contempt for the British people is branded as ‘shutting down debate’ and ‘extremist’
EDIT: They dehumanise themselves by acting like entitled aristocrats who think its their god given right to take what they want and harvest the countries wallets and coffers to line their own and their friends pockets.
5 comments
Nadhim Zahawi learnt from a young age to be careful with words. He grew up in Baghdad under Saddam Hussein’s police state, run by the Ba’ath Party. Every morning, as he and his sister packed their school bags, their mother would remind them not to tell anyone “what we talk about at home around the supper table”.
The Ba’athist model was based on that of the East German Stasi. “Teachers were recruited,” he recalls. “They would ask you, primary school children, ‘What did you discuss last night with your parents?’ To report back to the state. And that’s how they’d try to thwart, squash, kill, murder dissent.” As Kurds, the Zahawis were viewed with particular suspicion.
Perhaps in the circumstances, then, one can forgive the Education Secretary for sounding reasonably calm about his impending run-in with British school teachers, who are threatening to strike in the autumn if their wages don’t rise enough. Zahawi has offered new teachers a 9 per cent pay rise and existing teachers in England 5 per cent – but asks them to “be fair” and warns “parents will be incredibly angry” if they strike.
In the face of the Government’s crushing by-election defeats last week, he admits the situation is “incredibly difficult” but claims that there is a way out of the Conservatives’ problems if they “focus on delivery, as we did with the vaccine” and if they can demonstrate “stewardship of the economy” and “bring taxes down” before the next election.
He counsels his colleagues not to make a last-ditch attempt to unseat the Prime Minister: “We’ve got to set aside the current months of distraction and focus the whole Cabinet on operational delivery.”
There is no doubt that Zahawi is popular among Tories. He has risen steadily to second place on Conservative Home’s Cabinet league table, behind only Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, and his name comes up quickly in Westminster discussions of who should succeed Johnson. He is not aligned with any Tory faction, and it’s hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about him. As one fan puts it: “I think he could finally break the rule that no bald man is ever elected Prime Minister.”
I ask Zahawi if he wants the job. He claims that he isn’t running for leader because “there is no vacancy” and “we’ve got to pull together”. But according to two sources, Mark Fullbrook, the campaign guru who helped Johnson win the leadership and election in 2019, has quietly indicated that he will run Zahawi’s campaign.
I ask him why he is working with Fullbrook if he isn’t mulling a leadership bid. There is a pause, then Zahawi starts spluttering. “I’ve known Mark for decades,” he says. “Mark and… and Lynton [Crosby, the political strategist] work with… with Boris Johnson… he’s one of my oldest friends.” His discomfort is oddly endearing.
The young Zahawi could hardly have dreamt of being in this position. He moved here aged 11 without knowing a word of English. His father, an entrepreneur, had already fled Iraq after being warned he was about to be arrested. Zahawi recently told a podcast about the heart-stopping moment when a truckful of soldiers drove up to the plane his father was on before it left the tarmac. They went inside and – he never knew why – arrested someone else instead.
Rumours about his father being a “Western spy” spread quickly at school and six months later, his mother, a dentist, brought the children to the UK. Zahawi’s first impressions were of the cold, greyness and icy pavements.
“My sister and I would hold hands to stop us slipping and I remember that first week both of us falling,” he says. “You try to hide the tears and get up and keep walking and get to the school door. You can’t speak English at all. It was pretty horrific.”
The other children sensed his weakness. He spent a miserable period at Holland Park School in west London, being “the boy hiding in the back of the class trying to string words together” and, outside of school, being chased around the park by three bigger lads and dunked in the pond head-first whenever they caught him: “I was the bait.”
Mercifully, his parents switched him to private school, he learnt English and discovered he could talk to his teachers without fear. “I learnt that if I was able to speak the language and communicate to my teachers my fears, anxieties and my ambitions, then loads of people will help you in this great country,” he says. “When you grow up in a state where there is no freedom, you really do cherish the freedoms that we have.”
He was not political as a boy, however. He spent his time following football, studying maths and science, and mastering his nemesis, the ice, by skating. He also learnt to ride. “The moment I saw the horse, the pony, I just fell in love,” he says. He began to train seriously, learning to showjump, and wanted at one point to buy a livery stables instead of going to university. But his education-focused mother quickly put the kibosh on that idea.
At any rate, when he was 18, his father bet the family fortune, including their house, on a risky business idea and went bankrupt. Zahawi considered taking a job as a cab driver to support them. But his mother would not hear of it. She pawned her jewellery and he went to University College London to study chemical engineering. It was there that he first encountered politics.
Once again, it began with a bully. “I was a very thin 18-year-old, about a third of the size of what I am now, with big frizzy hair,” Zahawi recalls. One day during freshers’ week, he was walking into the student union building when a burly fellow tried to shove a copy of the Socialist Worker magazine into his hands. Zahawi declined – and the man became belligerent.
This time, however, he resolved not to suffer the bully alone. “I was so offended that I just thought I’m going to go and find out what the other side thinks,” he says. So he walked inside and signed up to the Conservative Collegiate Forum. “They just looked reasonable and actually they were very pleasant and talked about things like opportunity and freedom – stuff that resonated with me,” he says. “I just thought, ‘those are my values’.”
His experiences left him with an abiding distrust of the hard Left, what he calls “the Corbynista wing of the Labour Party”.
“There are elements of the hard Left whose currency, whose politics is to dehumanise their opponents, Conservatives, right-of-centre-thinking people, and to shut down debate,” he says.
Not long after university, working in marketing after an unsuccessful venture of his own selling Teletubbies merchandise, he found himself on the doorstep of Jeffrey Archer’s penthouse flat. He was there to raise money for a charity to support Kurdish victims of the first Gulf War, a project that later became embroiled in controversy over Archer’s alleged exaggerated claims about its fundraising. Archer took Zahawi and his friend, the interior designer Broosk Saib, under his wing, nicknaming them “lemon Kurd” and “bean Kurd”, and in 1994 helped Zahawi win a seat as a councillor in Wandsworth – where he quickly earned a reputation as a man who could get things done.
In 2004, he married his friend Saib’s sister, Lana. I ask how he won her hand and he grins.
“How did I persuade her? With that goofy smile,” he jokes. They have twin step-sons aged 25, both graduates of Princeton in the US, and a nine-year-old daughter. Unlike many politician’s families, however, the Zahawi wife and children hardly ever appear on the campaign trail or their father’s Instagram account.
In 1997, Zahawi volunteered to work on Archer’s mayoral campaign alongside a posse of aspiring politicians that included Priti Patel, Sajid Javid, Kwasi Kwarteng and Stephan Shakespeare. But when Archer quit the race over perjury allegations, the gang was left adrift. One day, Shakespeare and Zahawi met up in a greasy spoon to kick around ideas for a business project that would use a new-fangled technology called the internet to collect data. The resulting company, leading market researchers YouGov, is now a multinational British success story worth more than £1 billion.
This from the group trying to clamp down on protests.
Won’t someone please think of the poor oppressed people who hold all the power.
>Nadhim Zahawi learnt from a young age to be careful with words.
then we get
>“There are elements of the hard Left whose currency, whose politics is to dehumanise their opponents, Conservatives, right-of-centre-thinking people, and to shut down debate,” he says.
Someone should introduce him to that Mitchell and Webb sketch.
For a guy who regurlarly gaslights the nation for his dear leader he doesn’t seem to have a clue that he is one of those shits he is so out to say within the article that he is against.
There is no debate. These right wing Tory asshats love to hide behind etiquette and ‘rational debate’ when every decision is a callus bearly concealed stab at the poor. Legitimate outrage at the actions of a party that has nothing, nothing but contempt for the British people is branded as ‘shutting down debate’ and ‘extremist’
EDIT: They dehumanise themselves by acting like entitled aristocrats who think its their god given right to take what they want and harvest the countries wallets and coffers to line their own and their friends pockets.