Rumors that his father was a “Western spy” quickly spread around the school and six months later, his mother, a dentist, brought the children to the UK. Zahawi’s first impressions were of cold, gray and frozen pavements. “My sister and I were holding hands so we wouldn’t slip, and I remember that first week we both fell,” she says. “You try to hide the tears and you get up and keep walking and you reach the door of the school. You can’t speak any English. It was pretty horrible.” The other children sensed his weakness. He had a miserable time at Holland Park School in west London, being “the boy who hid at the back of the class trying to connect words” and, outside school, he was chased in the park by three older lads and dipped in the lake. with his head whenever he was caught: “I was the bait.” Fortunately, his parents switched him to a private school, he learned English and found that he could talk to his teachers without fear. “I learned that if I could speak the language and communicate my fears, anxieties and aspirations to my teachers, then many people will help you in this great country,” she says. “When you grow up in a state where there’s no freedom, you really love the freedoms we have.” However, as a boy he was not a politician. He spent his time following football, studying math and science, and conquering his nemesis, the ice, by skating. He also learned to ride a horse. “The moment I saw the horse, the pony, I just fell in love,” she says. He began training seriously, learning to show jump, and at one point wanted to buy a livery stable instead of going to university. But his education-focused mother quickly put the kibosh on that idea. In any case, when he was 18, his father bet the family fortune, including their house, on a risky business idea and it went bankrupt. Zahawi considered getting a job as a taxi driver to support them. But his mother wouldn’t listen. She pawned her jewelry and he went to University College London to study chemical engineering. There he met politics for the first time. Once again, it started with a bully. “I was a very thin 18-year-old, about a third of the size I am now, with big curly hair,” Zahawi recalls. One day during pioneer week, he was entering the student union building when a burly fellow 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 suffer the bully alone. “I was so offended that I thought I’d go and find out what the other side was thinking,” he says. So he went in and signed up for the Conservative Collective Forum. “They just seemed reasonable and were actually very pleasant and talked about things like opportunity and freedom – things that resonated with me,” he says. “I just thought, ‘These are my values.’ His experiences have left him with an abiding distrust of the hard Left, what he calls “the Corbynista wing of the Labor Party”. “There are elements of the hard Left whose currency, whose policy is to dehumanize their opponents, Conservatives, right-wing thinking people and shut down debate,” he says.
