Young Zahawi could hardly have dreamed of being in that position. He moved here at the age of 11 without knowing a word of English. His father, an entrepreneur, had already fled Iraq after being warned he was about to be arrested. Recently, Zahawi explained in a podcast the moment his heart stopped when a truck full of soldiers drove to the plane his father was on before he left the tarmac. They went in and, never knowing why, arrested someone else.
Rumors that his father was a “Western spy” quickly spread to the school and six months later, his mother, a dentist, took the children to the UK. Zahawi’s first impressions were of the cold, the grayness and the icy pavements.
“My sister and I held hands to keep us from slipping and I remember that first week we both fell,” he says. “You try to hide your tears and you get up and keep walking and you get to the school door. You can’t speak English at all. It was pretty awful. “
The other children felt his weakness. He spent a miserable period at Holland Park School in west London, being “the boy hiding in the back of the classroom trying to put words together” and, outside of school, three older boys the they chased him through the park and submerged him in the pond. of head every time they caught him: “I was the bait.”
Fortunately, his parents changed him to a private school, he learned English and discovered that he could talk to his teachers without fear. “I learned that if I was able to speak the language and communicate to my teachers my fears, anxieties and ambitions, then a lot 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 love the freedoms we have.”
However, as a child he was not a politician. He spent his time following football, studying math and science, and mastering his nemesis, ice, skating. He also learned to ride. “The moment I saw the horse, the pony, I fell in love,” he says. He started training seriously, learning to jump hurdles, and at one point wanted to buy himself a pound box instead of going to college. But his education-focused mother quickly put the kibosh to that idea.
In any case, when he was 18, his father bet his family fortune, including his house, on a risky business idea and went bankrupt. Zahawi considered taking a job as a taxi driver to support them. But his mother did not know how to talk about it. She pushed her jewelry and he went to University College London to study chemical engineering. It was there that he first met politics.
Again, it started with a bully. “I was a very thin 18-year-old, about a third the size of what I am now, with very frizzy hair,” Zahawi recalls. One day, during the week of his early years, he was entering the student union building, when a burly man tried to take a copy of Socialist Worker magazine into his hands. Zahawi declined and the man became belligerent.
This time, however, he decided not to suffer the harassment alone. “I was so offended that I just thought I was going to find out what the other side thinks,” he says. So he came in and signed up for the Conservative Collegiate Forum. “They seemed reasonable and in fact they were very nice and talked about things like opportunity and freedom, things that resonated with me,” he says. “I just thought, ‘these are my values.'”
His experiences left him with a permanent distrust of the hard left, what he calls “the Corbynist wing of the Labor Party.”
“There are elements of the hard left whose currency, whose policy is to dehumanize its opponents, conservatives, center-right thinking people, and close the debate,” he says.