Young Zahawi hardly dreamed of being in this position. He moved here at age 11 without knowing a word of English. His father, an entrepreneur, had already fled Iraq after being warned he would be arrested. Zahawi recently spoke on a podcast about the heart-stopping moment when a truckload of soldiers approached the plane his father was in before it veered off the runway. They went inside and—he never understood why—arrested someone else instead.
Rumors that his father was a “Western spy” spread quickly at school and six months later his mother, a dentist, took the children to the UK. Zahawi’s first impressions were of the cold, the gray and the icy pavements.
“My sister and I were holding hands so we wouldn’t slip, and I remember the first week we both fell,” he says. “You try to hide the tears and get up, keep walking and get to the door of the school. You can’t speak English at all. It was pretty terrifying.”
The other children sensed his weakness. He spent an unhappy spell at Holland Park School in west London, being “the boy who hides at the back of the class trying to string words together”, and outside school he was chased around the park by three older boys and dunked in the lake head first when caught: “I was the bait.”
Mercifully, his parents transferred him to a private school, he learned English and found he could talk to his teachers without fear. “I learned that if I can speak the language and share with my teachers my fears, anxieties and ambitions, then many people will help you in this great country,” he says. “When you grow up in a country where there’s no freedom, you really appreciate the freedoms we have.”
However, he was not political as a boy. He spent his time watching football, studying math and science, and mastering his nemesis, the ice, by skating. He also learned to ride. “The moment I saw the horse, the pony, I just fell in love,” he says. He began training seriously, learning to show jump, and at one point wanted to buy stables instead of going to university. But his mother, focused on education, quickly frustrated this idea.
In any case, when he was 18, his father gambled the family fortune, including their house, on a risky business idea and went bankrupt. Zahawi considered starting a job as a taxi driver to support them. But his mother didn’t want to hear about it. She pawned her jewelry and he went to University College London to study chemical engineering. There he encountered politics for the first time.
Once again it started with a bully. “I was a very skinny 18-year-old, about a third of what I am now, with big curly hair,” Zahawi recalls. One day during students’ week, he was walking into the student union building when a burly friend tried to shove a copy of Socialist Worker into his hands. Zahawi refused – and the man became belligerent.
This time, however, he decided not to put up with the bully alone. “I was so offended that I just thought I’d go and find out what the other side was thinking,” he says. So he went inside and enrolled in the Conservative Collegiate Forum. “They just seemed reasonable and were actually 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 experience left him with a lasting 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 their opponents, conservatives, center-right-minded people, and shut down debate,” he says.
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