The ‘MP for Shakespeare’ who would be king

The Iraqi-born Education Secretary speaks to Juliet Samuel about his childhood, rumours of a Tory leadership bid, and his looming battle with teachers over strikes

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 newspaper 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-centrethinking 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-yearold daughter. Unlike many politicians’ families, however, Zahawi’s wife and children hardly ever appear on the campaign trail or on 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 £1billion.

With his fortune made, Zahawi began to focus on politics. In 2010, he was selected as Tory candidate for the safe seat of Stratford-on-avon, making him the “MP for Shakespeare” – as he never tires of saying. He stepped down as chief executive of Yougov, but kept up some business interests, working as a highly paid adviser to Gulf Keystone, an oil company that was one of the first to start exporting from Kurdish Iraq.

He also developed expensive tastes, buying designer spectacles, works by the British pop artist Derek Boshier and acquiring the riding stables he had always wanted (in 2013 he was infamously found to have claimed the livery’s £4,000 heating bill on expenses, which he said he had done in error and repaid).

Estimates of his net worth range from £30million to £100million. He won’t confirm the amount, saying: “I’ve been very lucky in life.” And he responds without hesitation when I ask whether he or his wife are non-domiciled in the UK for tax purposes: “No.”

For years, he stayed mainly on the back benches. He backed Brexit in 2016, then entered government under Theresa May as a parliamentary under-secretary of state for education. It wasn’t until 2020 that the call came that would jumpstart his political career. With Britain in the grip of a second lockdown, Boris Johnson needed someone to oversee an unprecedented project: the emergency rollout of a new vaccine to the entire adult British population. He asked Zahawi to take charge.

According to a former colleague, the role could have been made for him: “He enjoys logistics. He likes how things move around and what effect they might have. He likes getting people to work as a team.”

Zahawi was soon popping up regularly on our TV screens, encouraging everyone to get jabbed. But aside from managing people, it’s clear that he also fully embraced his penchant for data geekery.

“We had low uptake of the vaccine among Afro-caribbean men in Tottenham, right? The kneejerk reaction was to say, ‘Let’s put in more walk-in centres.’ Actually, when you analysed the data, there were more walk-in centres within five minutes’ walk of the postcodes with the lowest vaccine uptake than the highest vaccine uptake,” he says. “I could have thrown half a billion quid at that. But some of it was cultural, some of it was trust in institutions, so we had a different policy response with ambassadors who would knock on doors saying, ‘I’m from your community’ – preferably a clinician who would talk about vaccine efficacy with those people. That’s how we managed to get the rates up.”

It is clear that Zahawi is an unusual British politician, in that he enjoys delivering complex projects and is good at it. His mantra, following the by-election defeats, was “delivery, delivery, delivery”. But I am still not clear on what exactly he would deliver if he had the power. His parliamentary office has the obligatory portrait of Margaret Thatcher on the wall, so I ask him whether he is a Thatcherite or something else. Thatcher became prime minister a year after he moved to the UK, he recalls. “My mother I remember saying to me, ‘Son, a grocer’s daughter has just become prime minister. You can do anything in this country.’”

He also praises her as a student of chemistry (like him) who was “a pioneer of evidence-led government”. I point out that if she were in charge now, she might be pursuing farreaching reforms to change our economy after Brexit to offset the rising cost of trade, and deregulate and replace our tax-and-spend model with something more sustainable.

“You’re right to challenge us on that, but it’s beginning to happen,” he says, citing the example of pharmaceuticals, where “we went from being a concern to much of the pharma community because of Brexit to being one of the most attractive places” owing to “agile” vaccine regulation.

I point out that, none the less, business investment is flat-lining.

He stumbles, before admitting: “We need to look at what we are putting on the table for wealth creators.” As an entrepreneur, he adds, he understands that “unless you’ve lost money, you have no idea how hard it is to make money”. It sounds reasonable,

‘I was chased and dunked in the pond head-first. I was the bait. I was the game’

‘When you grow up in a state with no freedom, you cherish the freedoms we have’

but as I push him to take a stand on one thing after another, he wanders off into the wilderness of political verbiage.

Why hasn’t the Government taken universities to task for failing students during the pandemic? “My universities minister did a brilliant job at engaging with the sector…” he waffles. If, as he believes, it is impossible for humans to change sex, shouldn’t schools be helping trans children to access mental health services before altering changing room arrangements? “[I’ve got] three pillars…” he goes on.

He is offering most teachers beyond new-starters a below-inflation pay rise – is he asking them to take a hit for the sake of children’s education? “There’s a global battle against inflation…” he obfuscates. Why is his department still conducting ineffective unconscious bias training even after the Government said it would cease? “I’ve got a massive skills agenda…”

His loyalty to the boss throughout partygate seems to have moulded him into someone who sounds like a typically vague politician. It comes, says his ex-colleague, of “defending the indefensible. That’s what he’s been thrust into, but I don’t think that’s the essence of him.” The question is whether he can present his other self: a charismatic operations man with a friendly smile, Right-wing instincts and a pragmatic approach to problems.

I do get one glimpse of how his politics manifests when I press him on the issue of teaching unions and their obstructionist approach to reopening schools during the pandemic. Unions claimed, for example, that schools could not possibly reopen until they all had air purifiers installed. “We dealt with it,” he says. “If you remain evidence-led it’s very hard for people to oppose you, including the unions.”

He explains: instead of sending out 350,000 expensive air purifiers, he responded to the unions by sending out 350,000 cheaper CO2 monitors, resulting in a proven need for only 10,000 more purifiers. “That is good stewardship of public money,” he says – and it was hard to argue against. The strategy has, however, left the unions as strong as ever and threatening strikes over pay in the autumn.

Meanwhile, he is trying to establish a tutoring service for children who have fallen behind, promote technical T-levels to the same prestige as A-levels and redraft the Schools Bill, which he sent into Parliament with extraneous clauses that prompted the Lords to savage it as a “power grab”. Zahawi claims this was a legislative strategy, rather than an oversight, but has been forced into a significant about-turn, removing the first 18 clauses.

I wonder, amid all of this, whether he has time to indulge any vices. “My wife would say I’m a workaholic,” he says, which I point out is a rather job-interview answer. “It’s not, I promise you!” he exclaims, laughing. “It’s the first thing that came into my head! If Lana was here, she’d say, ‘He just works all hours!’”

Then he goes off on one of his politician routines about how “human capital” is “the most valuable resource on Earth” and I tune out.