A View From The Top with Nadhim Zahawi, the CEO who became children's minister

Ask Nadhim Zahawi what he is most proud of during his first year as children’s minister and he will tell you about the Care Leaver Covenant, a scheme launched by the Department of Education in October.

Amazon, Rolls-Royce and Barclays LifeSkills signed up to offer internships, work placements and skills workshops to young people leaving the care system through the scheme, which had originally been planned for launch in October 2016. Not long after he became children’s minister in January 2018, Mr Zahawi announced the appointment of a private company called Spectra First to get more than 50 businesses to provide work-based opportunities to young people leaving the care system, including every government department.

“My diary secretary here is brilliant, I would hire her in a heartbeat,” Mr Zahawi says of one of his own hires. He has, since this interview took place, made her a permanent member of staff. “All they need is an opportunity in life. You just have to think about these kids in the round. You have to think about their life and their experiences slightly different to, dare I say it, our kids.”

Mr Zahawi could not have had a more different start. He arrived in the UK at the age of nine, the child of Kurdish parents fleeing the war in Iraq. His first school was Holland Park, a comprehensive in west London. He later moved to Ibstock Place, a private school, and King’s College School, at the time an independent school for boys in Wimbledon.

He won a place at University College London to study chemical engineering, but quickly showed an interest in businesses and started a property company after graduating. In business, he is best known for YouGov, the polling company he co-founded in a garden shed in 2000. He remained its chief executive until 2010, when he was elected to parliament.

He gave up several additional business interests when he was made education minister in a cabinet reshuffle in January 2018, including a £350,000-a-year, part-time job at Gulf Keystone, an oil company, and a 50 per cent stake in Zahawi and Zahawi, a firm he founded with his wife Lana in 2010.

But Mr Zahawi still remembers how difficult it was to arrive in the country as a young boy, with no way to communicate. “You’re wrenched away from your friends and you come to a new country, you have to start all over again,” he says. “I sat at the back of the class, I didn’t want to get laughed at, trying to string the words together to make a sentence.”

Language, he quickly understood, would be the key to moving ahead. “I worked out very quickly that if you communicate well, doors open for you,” he says.

I ask him whether he feels young people from Syria and Afghanistan trying to get to this country in search of a better life should be given the same opportunity. He explains that his family went through the weren’t asylum seekers, but applied for settled status through the immigration system to set up a business in the UK. He believed that people who work hard should be allowed to come to the UK.

“We’ve got a rigorous immigration system to do that,” he says. “We’ll be able to decide our own immigration policy post-Brexit. For genuine asylum seekers we should be welcoming.”

Mr Zahawi backed leaving the European Union. “Brexit appeals to me for no other reason than I thought we could reform within the EU, but when that became undeliverable for David Cameron I reluctantly backed Brexit because I thought the direction of travel for the EU is not right for us.”

He says he doesn’t believe the German people have bought into the so-called transfer union, in which wealth within the EU ends up supporting weaker southern economies. He also believes Britons would never back the idea of a European army, an idea loathed by Brexiteers, but also seen as highly unlikely: “We’re better off exiting and wishing them luck in their endeavours but securing a trade deal so that we have access to the single market.”

He never set out to be a politician. But a chance encounter at university piqued his interest. “At the University College of London union, on the first week at university, there was a bloke handing out the Socialist Worker outside. It was thin and small and I politely declined his offer at which point he was so aggressive, I thought I would go and find out about what the other side thinks,” he remembers.

He was elected Conservative councillor in Putney in 1994, where he remained until 2006. In the interim, he helped run Jeffrey Archer’s unsuccessful campaign for Mayor of London in 1998. He was selected by the local Conservative association for the safe Tory seat of Stratford-on-Avon in 2010 and was re-elected in 2015 and 2017.

As a member of parliament, Mr Zahawi has voted for reducing the rate of corporation tax and against an amendment in parliament on homes under a certain rent limit being “fit for human habitation”, notable because he is reported to have spent £25m buying property around London for buy-to-let and commercial use.

His success in property has come later in life. After university, Mr Zahawi started an estate agency, but the business suffered when the property market entered a downturn in the Eighties. Mr Zahawi and his business partners were forced to liquidate.

“The lesson there was that you don’t know how hard it is to make money unless you lose money,” he says. “It’s well worth all of us remembering in politics that every morning, millions of people get up and start a business or work in a small business and we have to make sure we deliver for them. It really does matter that what we do here does not hurt them and their prospects.”

Small businesses are expected to be hit hardest by the UK’s decision to leave the EU. Surveys show many businesses have already been affected. Business investment fell for four consecutive quarters in 2018 for the first time since the financial crisis, according to the ONS.

Eighty per cent of businesses considered Brexit uncertainty to have already had a negative impact on their investment decisions, according to a survey conducted in October 2018 by the Confederation of British Industry. Falling numbers of migrants have created a squeeze among employers, with the manufacturing industry in particular facing the biggest worker shortage in 30 years, according to the British Chambers of Commerce.

What exactly will be better for small businesses after Brexit? Mr Zahawi doesn’t pause for breath: “One, we’ll be able to trade with the rest of the world. Two, we should be able to trade healthily with Europe and continue to have that trade. And three we’ll have our own policies on immigration or any other issues delivered in the UK.”

Despite the challenges of his work, Mr Zahawi says he pinches himself every morning to think that he has ended up where he has. “Look at me today, a boy born in Baghdad, now a member of parliament for Shakespeare and a minister in Her Majesty’s government,” he says. “This country is an amazing country, it really is.”