Nadhim Zahawi: 'I came to the UK as a refugee, but immigration has gone too far'

Nadhim Zahawi's family fled to the UK from Iraq as refugees in 1978 fearing for their lives after friends and relatives were killed by Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.

Zahawi has always had a sense of guilt about describing himself as a refugee’ He wonders if the word should be reserved for those “who haven’t been as lucky as me” The former Chancellor is one of the most optimistic voices you could find right now.

One of Zahawi ’s aunts was held in solitary confinement for 10 days , punished for making a light joke about a portrait of the dictator hanging in a library.

On release she was “a totally changed person” and “became a loner, afraid to talk anyone,” he reveals in his book.

Zahawi was brought up in a liberal Muslim family where, he writes, “everyone drank and no one covered up” The former MP for Stratford -on-Avon was born in Baghdad .

Right-wing author Douglas Murray has been labelled “extremely Islamophobic” by the Muslim Council of Britain .

Zahawi wrote in a newspaper column last month that Murray had been “brave enough to warn that if the proper authorities do not grasp the nettle on issues of social cohesion and uniform upholding of the rule of law, then mobs will.