The Secretary of State Nadhim Zahawi

ON COMING TO THE UK, THE VACCINE PROGRAMME, AND WHY THERESA MAY IS MISUNDERSTOOD

Myparents came to these shores in 1978. I was 11 years old and I couldn’t speak a word of English – or very few words. I was a very proud young man in the sense that I didn’t want to make mistakes in class in school with my English, so I sat in the back of a class trying to string words together to make a sentence to join in the class. Of course by the time I made the sentence in my head, the subject matter had moved on!

So the teacher called my parents and said, “Look, we think that he has a learning disability because he is really not contributing at all.” And within six months of course I’d picked up the language, and very quickly worked out that this is an amazing country where there are many people prepared to help a young man like myself.

There were lots of mentors who helped me in my career. I went to University College London, where I read chemical engineering. Very fortuitously in many ways, I founded YouGov which has now become one of the United Kingdom’s unicorns, and is now worth over a billion dollars. I left that 10 years ago after taking it public. I am particularly proud now to be the Member of Parliament for Stratford-upon-Avon in the heart of England, which is the birthplace and the resting place of William Shakespeare.

All this means that every morning, I wake up and pinch myself to think that the boy from Baghdad, born to Kurdish parents, has achieved this. I attribute it to the extraordinary nature of this country, which offers two gifts. One is freedom, and the other is opportunity. These two things embody everything that is great about the family of nations that makes up the United Kingdom.

I am sometimes asked how I relax in my high-pressure roles. One thing I love