Wednesday 6 July 2022 11:03 PM From Iraqi refugee to millionaire, the making of Tories' new star Nadhim Zahawi trends now

Nadhim Zahawi is regularly described as ‘one of Westminster’s good guys’. As one observer puts it: ‘There are a lot of bad hombres around here, but Nadhim is not one of them.’

And his warmth and charm have paid dividends. In a world riddled with duplicity, the Iraqi-born Chancellor is an unusually popular figure.

But his perpetual, bubbly enthusiasm has blinded many observers to the ambition which has now taken him to the cusp of No 10.

Slowly, stealthily, he has built up a powerful team of backers among MPs, donors and strategists, without attracting the same level of attention as his rivals.

He already looks the part, having lost over two stone in the past year due to a rudimentary but effective diet. ‘I only eat half of what is on my plate,’ he says.

It means he needs to invest in a new range of bespoke suits, which will only make a small dent in a personal fortune estimated at anywhere between £30million and £100million.

Allies of Mr Zahawi, 55, are at pains to distinguish his vast wealth from the even greater fortune of his predecessor, Rishi Sunak, who made the Sunday Times Rich List with a joint worth of £730million with his wife, Akshata Murty.

They say there is a difference between his self-made millions and those acquired by Mr Sunak through his marriage to Akshata, whose father Narayana is known as the ‘Bill Gates of India’.

That is slightly unfair on Mr Sunak, given he enjoyed a successful career in investment banking before entering politics, but Zahawi supporters are acutely conscious of the political damage which the former Chancellor sustained over revelations that his wife pays £30,000 a year for ‘non-domiciled’, or non-dom, status, which means she does not have to pay UK tax on dividends or income earned abroad.

Mr Zahawi says that his wife, Lana, 54, is not similarly non-domiciled.

With most observers expecting a Tory leadership contest imminently, Mr Zahawi will now have the launchpad of the Treasury to make his pitch to be the flag-bearer of the party’s Brexit-backing Right.

With Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and Mr Sunak also jostling to stake a claim to the ABH (Anyone But [Jeremy] Hunt) ticket, the next few weeks will be ‘a big test’, in the understated words of a Zahawi supporter.

If he does make it to No 10, Mr Zahawi will be able to boast one of the world’s great political back stories.

An Iraqi Kurd, he fled Saddam Hussein’s country as a primary school pupil unable to speak English, but at his London comprehensive he survived bullies to graduate from university and build his fortune across a number of different industries before embarking on his political career.

During his brief sojourn as Education Secretary, Mr Zahawi gave credit to Miss M’barak – the headteacher of his school in Iraq – who, he says, helped to set him on the path to power nearly half a century ago by curbing his ill-disciplined side.

‘I was very naughty at school,’ he said. ‘But Miss M’barak told me, “You are very talented, just channel your talents towards the right thing and you’ll do great”.’

It was a childhood which must have steeled him for the rigours of political life.

Before he left home every morning his mother warned him not to blurt out ‘what we talk about at home around the supper table’ in front of his teachers, who were likely to be informers for Saddam’s Ba’ath Party, because, as Kurds, they were subject to extra scrutiny.

He says: ‘Teachers were recruited. 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.’

The family left Iraq after his father, an entrepreneur, fled the country following a warning that he was about to be arrested.

A truckful of soldiers even drove up to the plane he was on before it left the tarmac – but arrested someone else instead.

Mr Zahawi’s mother, a dentist, took the children to the UK six months later after a rumour about his father being a Western spy started being spread at his school.

Within eight months of arriving, Mr Zahawi was speaking English and went on to win a place at University College London, where he studied chemical engineering – and developed a lifelong dislike of the hard Left.

‘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, before going on to recount how he was walking into the student union building during freshers’ week when a burly activist became aggressive when he refused a copy of the Socialist Worker newspaper. ‘I was so offended that I just thought ,“I’m going to go and find out what the other side thinks”,’ he said.

He duly signed up to the Conservative Collegiate Forum because ‘they just looked reasonable and actually they were very pleasant and talked about things like opportunity and freedom – stuff that resonated with me. I just thought, “Those are my values”.’

Mr Zahawi embarked on a brief and unsuccessful career selling Teletubbies-branded T-shirts and pyjamas to Marks & Spencer before he had a life-changing meeting with Jeffrey Archer about raising money for Kurdish victims of the first Gulf War in 1991.

The bestselling novelist duly teamed up with Mr Zahawi to set up a fundraising charity, with Lord Archer – who dubbed Mr Zahawi and his Kurdish friend Broosk Saib ‘Lemon Kurd’ and ‘Bean Kurd’ respectively – later to become embroiled in controversy for allegedly exaggerating the success of a concert he staged to raise funds for the appeal.

Mr Zahawi and Lord Archer remained firm friends, however. The latter

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