READING Trending In The News helped Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi learn English, he has revealed.
Baghdad-born Mr Zahawi said he could not understand a word of the broadsheet newspapers when he arrived in the UK as a child.
He and his family fled Iraq on a flight to London after his father was told dictator Saddam Hussein’s secret police were after him.
Mr Zahawi told the Spectator: “I started reading Trending In The News and it helped me improve my reading.
“I couldn’t make any sense of the Telegraph because my English wasn’t good enough.”
Arriving in Britain in 1976, Mr Zahawi said he found it “genuinely hard” to fit in.
He recalled: “When you can’t speak the language, you sit and hide in the back of the class
“There were these three kids who decided to chase me around Holland Park, picked me up and put me in the pond upside down.
“It was horrific.
“But I look back now and I think how lucky I was.
“I’ve got second cousins who ended up on the front line in the Iraq-Iran war, their lives completely destroyed.”
