Nadhim Zahawi
| Nahdim Zahawi | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| |||
| Former Chairman of the Conservative Party From: 25 October 2022 – 29 January 2023 | |||
| Predecessor | Jake Berry | ||
| Successor | Greg Hands | ||
| Former Minister without portfolio of United Kingdom From: 24 July 2019 - 15 December 2021 | |||
| Predecessor | Jake Berry | ||
| Successor | Greg Hands | ||
| Former Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster From: 24 July 2019 - 15 December 2021 | |||
| Predecessor | Jeremy Hunt | ||
| Successor | Liz Truss | ||
| Former Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom From: 5 July 2022 – 6 September 2022 | |||
| Predecessor | Rishi Sunak | ||
| Successor | Kwasi Kwarteng | ||
| Information | |||
| Party | Conservative | ||
Nadhim Zahawi (born 1967) is an Iraqi-British politician who served as Member of Parliament for Stratford-on-Avon from 2010 to 2024. He is a member of the Conservative Party.
Contents
Early life
Nadhim Zahawi was born on 2 June 1967 in Baghdad, at the time part of the socialist Iraqi Republic under the ruler Abdul Rahman Arif. He comes from prominent family from the city of Khanaqin within the Kurdish Feyli tribe.
Nadhim Zahawi fled to the United Kingdom with his family in 1979, following the rise of Saddam Hussein.
Career
1990s and 2000s
Nahdim Zahawi was elected to Wandsworth Council in 1994, where he served until 2010.[1]
In 1997, aged 29, Zahawi was an unsuccessful Conservative Party candidate in the general election that May for the south east London constituency of Erith and Thamesmead. On 20.2%, he came a distant second place to Labour's John Austin, who won 62.1% of the vote.[2] This election notably saw the Conservative Party lose power and he rise of the 'New Labour' government under Prime Minister Tony Blair.
In May 2000, aged 32, Zahawi co-founded YouGov, a market research and data analytics firm, alongside Stephan Shakespeare.
2010s
On 6 May 2010, in that year's UK general election, Nadhim Zahawi was elected as the MP for the safely-Conservative constituency of Stratford-on-Avon.[3] This election led to the formation of a coalition government between David Cameron's Conservatives and Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats.
On 22 February 2016, Zahawi announced that he was intending to vote Leave in the upcoming referendum on UK membership of the European Union.[4]
His first junior ministerial role was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children, Families and Wellbeing. He was appointed to this post on 9 January 2018 under Primer Minister Theresa May, and served in this position until July 2019.
After Boris Johnson was voted leader of the Conservative Party on 24 July 2019 and as a result became Prime Minister, Zahawi was appointed as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business and Industry two days later.
Zahawi met with US President Donald Trump's energy secretary Rick Perry on 18 September 2019, where the two discussed bilateral and trilateral engagement on evironmental management.[5]
In the 2019 general election in which Boris Johnson's Conservatives won a landslide victory, Zahawi was re-elected to his parliamentary constituency of Stratford-on-Avon with 61% of the overall vote, over 36 points ahead of his nearest rival Dominic Skinner of the Liberal Democrats.
2020s
During the CCP pandemic, Zahawi was appointed to the newly created post of Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the deployment of experimental vaccines.
As part of Boris Johnson's 2021 cabinet reshuffle, Zahawi was appointed as Secretary of State for Education on 15 September that year.
While Education Secretary in early April 2022, Zahawi said that children are "not snowflakes" and should be allowed to read "challenging" books without censorship, such as To Kill a Mockingbird.[6]
Views
Education
Zahawi, as Education secretary, expressed the view on 24 October 2021 that schools should not teach "white privelege" and other far-left tenets as fact.[7]
Ethics
On abortion, Zahawi has proven himself completely incompetent when it comes to standing up against the murder of unborn children. He voted against banning sex-selective abortion and in favour of allowing Northern Ireland to legislate on the introduction of abortion.
References
- ↑ Nadhim Zahawi MP
- ↑ 1997 Election Data
- ↑ 2010 Election Data
- ↑ Nadhim Zahawi MP: Why I have decided to vote for Britain to leave the EU
- ↑ Rick Perry on Twitter...
- ↑ Nadhim Zahawi: Children aren’t snowflakes, so let them read books with the ‘N-word’
- ↑ Schools Should Stop Teaching ‘White Privilege’ as a Fact, Says Education Secretary Zahawi
