James Price served as Chief of Staff and as a senior special adviser to Nadhim Zahawi.
Being someone’s SpAd is a peculiar mix of a role. Part cheerleader, part confidant, part exasperated sidekick, it’s nonetheless one of the best jobs in the country.
One day, your boss is the first person you speak to in the morning, and the last person you text before you go to bed (even with a partner lying next to you!) Then the next, the carousel stops, if the pair of you leave your posts. It’s like a cross between the first time you move away from your parents, mixed with the first night your children fly the nest.
So, it’s particularly sad to see Nadhim Zahawi, my old boss, announce that he will be standing down from Parliament at the next election. It’s a sad day personally, to see someone I admire so deeply, who is so full of love for his work, his constituents, and our country step away from this phase of his life. But it’s also a synecdoche of a much broader set of problems that the Conservative Party, and Britain more widely, are facing.
It now feels like a while ago, and I’ve little interest in dredging up the circumstances around his leaving the Government (that also meant his SpAds were left unemployed, of course). Suffice it to say that, in my own opinion, the regard in which politicians are held has fallen below the healthy scepticism that has for centuries provided this island with a bulwark of liberty against tyranny. It has, in too many cases, slipped into a cynicism that has become attenuated from the fundamental Christian ideas like grace and forgiveness that have been prerequisites building blocks of our civilisation.
After his own fall from grace, Alexander Hamilton was recalled to lead a defence of the United States in the Quasi-War. After years in the political wilderness, Cicero was raised to combat Mark Antony. Winston Churchill was redeemed after Gallipoli. Without quite being obsequious enough to compare Zahawi to these figures (old SpAdding habits die hard), the level of casual cynicism towards the most able recent ministers and their talents deprives us of real ability. Even at this late hour, the Zahawis of the Party would add enormously to our ability to govern.
Zahawi’s departure points to another big problem for the party and the country. The natural party of business is at risk of losing the right to that description. Too few ministers have the right private sector experience, and too many have allowed the civil service to add burdensome regulation onto enterprise in the damned foolish belief that it has no penalty to prosperity.
My own business experience is patchy. I did start at age five working every weekend helping my parents’ balloon decoration business in proud defiance of child labour laws, but as an adult it was limited to a few years of consulting. But I was fortunate enough to work for the founder of YouGov, that rare thing – a British unicorn.
The same clear-eyed, sharp-elbowed practices that now seem out of step with the sterilised and risk-averse world of Westminster are much more accepted either in the City, or to any small business owner up and down the land.
Take the UK’s world-beating vaccine rollout: too much forgotten in our understandable desire to blank out the horror of the Covid years. It was a triumph of innovation and necessity stripping out the usual ways of working. It wouldn’t have happened without Zahawi’s business experience and instincts.
I will spare the reader some of the horror stories that were averted, but one howler involved Public Health England’s plans to develop their own infrastructure to distribute vaccines at sub-zero temperatures all across the UK, blissfully ignorant of the pre-existing supply chains industry.
With Brandon Lewis and Sajid Javid also leaving parliament, the number of MPs both successful in – and tub-thumpingly positive towards – business is at risk of taking a real hit if we don’t replenish it with newcomers. It’s understandable, of course; to try to help your country, you need to give up oodles of executive power to do things, forfeit earnings in your prime, and be subjected to the kind of scrutiny that turned the heroic lockdown lifter into a pantomime villain.
When he was running CCHQ, Zahawi told us to hire an in-house head-hunter to find the next generation of great MPs and convince them to apply. He understood that the pipeline of talent was crucial, and that the skills they would bring would outweigh the inclusion of ghastly corporate speak like ‘pipeline of talent’.
There are still, wonderfully, and almost inexplicably, hordes of talented people out there who want to become Conservative MPs. Our party should make sure that these people, and their talents, experience, and skills (and the potential concomitant baggage) are given a fair shot alongside local councillors, as important as those people are, too.
As for Zahawi himself, I will close by reminding you of his closing words from the Mansion House speech he was able to deliver as Chancellor:
“Some of you may be wondering if you’ll ever see me again. By this time next year, many of you will perhaps have forgotten me.
“But let me assure you, this Iraqi immigrant* will never forget you or the honour of addressing you as Chancellor.
“This is the only country on Earth where that could be possible, which is why I love this country and I am proud my children and grandchildren will grow up here.
“My Lord Mayor, at least you have a year.
“If I only have a few months, rest assured this will be one of the greatest moments of my life.”
Thank you to a great servant of the United Kingdom, and the Conservative Party. May many more like him step up.
