Immigrant bus driver’s son who said of Windrush: It could’ve been me
SAJID Javid yesterday took control of one of the great offices of state, the latest stage in the long journey from Stapleton Road in Bristol, where he spent his formative years. Our new home Secretary grew up one of five sons of a Pakistani immigrant called Abdul-Ghani, who arrived in the UK in 1961 with just £1 in his pocket and gained the nickname ‘Mr Night and Day’ because, Sajid once recalled, he chose ‘to work every hour that God sent his way’. After stints in a Rochdale cotton mill, and then as a bus driver, Javid’s father moved to Bristol, where he bought a small clothing store on the busy road, which connects the inner city with its north-eastern suburbs. his young family were billeted in a two- bedroom flat upstairs. ‘three brothers were in one bedroom and myself and a younger brother were with my parents in the other,’ Sajid later recalled. Stapleton Road was once named ‘Britain’s worst street’ by a Sunday newspaper, which dubbed it a ‘lawless hellhole where murder, rape, shootings, drug- pushing, prostitution, knifings and violent robbery are commonplace’. Aged ten, Sajid witnessed race riots in the nearby St Paul’s district, where ethnic minority residents did battle with the police. if nothing else, his arrival in the home Office ticks plenty of boxes. it means that the politician responsible for law and order will have experienced first-hand the ravages of crime. it places a Muslim (albeit rarely practising) in charge of counter-terrorism policy, and ensures that policing will be overseen by someone who has seen, with his own eyes, what happens when forces lose the trust of the communities they serve.
Most importantly, in the short term at least, Sajid Javid’s promotion also puts someone from an immigrant background in charge of clearing up the mess of the Windrush scandal. As he said, his first response on hearing of the affair was to think: ‘it could have been me’.
the MP for Bromsgrove, who is 48, owes his success in both business and Westminster to another successful shopkeeper’s child: Margaret thatcher.
he keeps a £1,000 portrait of the former prime minister in his office, and often tells how her brand of free-market Conservatism occupies a special place in his heart.
the iron Lady not only spawned his original interest in politics, but also turned Britain into the sort of country where a working-class kid from Bristol who had talent and was prepared to work hard, could one day achieve fame and fortune. he was educated at a gritty comprehensive, where teachers forced even the brightest students to do CSEs, rather than the more demanding O-levels.
however, academic talent saw him win him a place at Exeter University, where he gained a degree in economics and politics.
After graduating, he pursued a career in the City, which was being revolutionised by the ‘Big Bang’ and other long overdue thatcherera reforms to deregulate the financial sector and turn it from a sort of closed shop for public schoolboys into n a classless meritocracy.
At 24, he became the youngest ever e vice-president of Chase Manhattan Bank. By his 30s, he was earning a reported £3million per year running the Asian trading division s of Deutsche Bank.
With his spoils, he bought smart Range Rovers and rental properties in West London and Bristol, along with a large family home near London’s exclusive Parsons Green, which cost £1,027,500 in 2001 and is now worth around £3million.
he lives there with wife Laura and their four privately educated children, who are at local day schools.
THEIRS is a thoroughly modern family. Laura, who is a practising Christian (‘ she goes to church more often than i go to mosque’), met Javid when he was 18 and they both took a holiday job in the offices of an insurance company.
he wooed her in a manner which, in these censorious post-Weinstein times, might raise eyebrows. ‘Every time i went to get the stapler, i’d touch her finger. then another finger. And there was no objection,’ he once told an interviewer. ‘Eventually i managed to ask her if she would come to the sandwich shop with me. i never looked back.’
She is believed to be responsible for his razored baked-bean scalp, persuading him to start wet shaving after he went prematurely bald in his 20s. ‘She told me bald men
look a lot sexier,’ Javid once recalled. By his late 30s, he was wealthy enough to retire from banking and pursue a career in politics. He was parachuted into the safe Midlands seat of Bromsgrove, and needless to say took a huge pay cut when he entered the Commons at the 2010 election.
He was almost immediately marked out as rising star by David Cameron and George Osborne, and within two years gained a frontbench role, as Economic Secretary to the Treasury.
From there, his fortunes have followed a neat upwards trajectory. A solid public speaker, who performs well in front of camera, he’s often put onto the airwaves when his party finds itself in a tricky spot.
Like all talented ministers, he is occasionally floated as a future Conservative leader. Supporters argue that his career and background represent a perfect foil to that of the middle-class Jeremy Corbyn.
Javid’s political nous has also helped him brazen out scandals that might have sunk less talented politicians.
In 2014, for example, it was reported that he was one of around 300 former employees of Deutsche Bank who elected to have bonuses paid via a Cayman Island company called Dark Blue Investments.
The scheme, designed to help high-earning staff reduce their tax bills, was later the subject of an HMRC probe. After a number of court hearings, including one at the Supreme Court in 2016 where a judge called it a ‘sophisticated attempt by the Houdini taxpayer to escape from the manacles of tax’, it was ruled unlawful, though staff who took part were not accused of wrongdoing.
Javid also faced another sticky situation as Business Secretary in early 2016, when Tata Steel decided to close plants in South Wales, threatening thousands of redundancies. As the crisis deepened, it emerged that he’d disappeared to Australia on an official trip, with a daughter in tow, hoping to take a holiday afterwards. Amid mounting anger, he was called back to London.
Then came the Brexit referendum. Despite being a life-long Eurosceptic, Javid decided to endorse the Remain campaign, in an apparent effort to retain the affections of Project Fear’s George Osborne, his longstanding mentor.
To the dismay of Thatcherite allies, on the eve of the vote he published a newspaper article headlined: ‘The only thing leaving the EU guarantees is a lost decade for British business.’ But immediately after the referendum, when the balance of power in the party had shifted, he effected a miraculous conversion. Only this month, he was using Twitter to warn that ‘British people gave politicians clear instructions’, which included ‘leaving the customs union, an intrinsic part of the EU’.
Some see these shifting pronouncements as evidence that Javid lacks principle, or has an unseemly lust for power, that will one day end in disaster. Others say they merely demonstrate that he possesses deft skills that could take him to the very top of politics.
We will doubtless find the truth in the coming months, as the bus driver’s son from Britain’s worst street takes on Whitehall’s most dysfunctional department.