How It Got Started
When people ask me my political preferences, they’re often surprised to hear that someone from a minority ethnic background would be prone to supporting the British centre-right. Or to put it another way: Tunisia made me centre-right.
At nine years old, I arrived in London as a political refugee, after my father was forced to flee Tunisia, the country of his birth. The brutal crackdown on political dissidents during the rule of not one, but two Tunisian presidents, eventually forced my father to leave and relocate his family to the UK – a country we made our home, and that of our family’s. In Tunisia, my father had been imprisoned and tortured – something I learnt about at the age of six – at the hands of a gruesome, big-state security apparatus. Indeed, my own feelings about the power of the state – and my preference for it to be smaller, not larger – were formed in my early teen years, as a youngster in the UK. While my peers might have been reading comic books, or playing football, I was reading the Economist, and translating accounts of torture . These issues meant a lot to me, from a very early age, and formed the bedrock of how I proceeded in life, including a sense of affinity with the traditional values of British conservatism, with a small ‘c’.
The revolutionary uprising in Tunisia in 2011 was a huge turning point for me. I became intimately involved in explaining what was happening inside Tunisia to a world hungry to know what this democratic experiment was all about; a revolutionary period that I had been waiting for my whole life. The work I did, conveying an insider’s perspective to the wider world, attracted the likes of BBC journalist Kim Ghattas, who later wrote about my work and others in her book, “The Secretary”. I continued to be deeply involved in Tunisian affairs following those early, heady years of the revolution, working on intergenerational dialogue, attempting to give young people a platform to directly communicate their message to Tunisian politicians and local media.
Today, I continue to write about North African (‘Maghrebi’) regional affairs, particularly Libya and Tunisia, alongside my consultancy work advising international companies who look to understand the unique challenges of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.