Allister Heath Is Sajid Javid the man to save the Tories?

The new Home Secretary should go for broke – he is auditioning for the job of Prime Minister, after all

Politics is about vision, execution and communication, yet it is rare to find a practitioner of the art who excels at all three. Winston Churchill was one; another was Margaret Thatcher, for whom it came at the cost of just four hours’ sleep a night. Most politicians are good at talking and plotting, but can’t manage for toffee – a great weakness in turbulent times.

This admittedly didn’t hold back Ronald Reagan, the most successful president of the modern age, who delegated superbly. But for Tony Blair, who didn’t do detail in either the domestic sphere (handed over to Gordon Brown) or foreign policy, the end result was catastrophic. David Cameron focused on communication and clever politicking, to the detriment of both ideological vision and execution. Theresa May is bogged down in micro-detail.

This is where Sajid Javid, the new Home Secretary, comes in. It is his professional background, as much as the fact that his parents were penniless immigrants from Pakistan, that sets him apart. Like Emmanuel Macron, he is a former investment banker; but whereas the French President worked for four years at Rothschild between political jobs, Javid’s two-decade career was in the international debt markets.

I met many senior investment bankers in my years as a financial journalist: they are a breed apart. The best ones are fixers and doers, not just talkers. Javid will have worked around the clock, hiring and firing, building teams and delivering profits in the harshest of environments. Such skills, rare in Westminster, will come in handy when it comes to turning around a dysfunctional department – and they would be just as useful in relaunching Brexit if the current plan continues to falter.

It therefore makes sense for Javid to go for broke. He is not just trying to transform the Home Office but auditioning for prime minister, a role that could become vacant sooner rather than later. This is Javid’s moment, the vindication of his (financially costly) decision to quit the City in 2009. He is, in many ways, a dream come true for Thatcherites: an optimistic, self-made true believer, a British Asian who loves free markets and his country, yet somebody who could, thanks to his background, reach out to the centrist wing of his party and to a metropolitan electorate.

Javid must now prove himself: he will need to make substantial changes to the Home Office and to crime and immigration policy, while upping his profile. He must show not just an ability to turn around a desperate situation, but prove to a sceptical party that he can master emotional intelligence. He has made progress on this front, displaying a more human side when comforting a woman in Finsbury Park after an attack on Muslim worshippers last June. He still needs to smile and relax more. His professional, political and personal to-do list over the next few months is terrifyingly long and will test him to the limit.

If the Home Office were a school, it would be put into special measures. No part of the British state is efficient, but the Home Office is in an especially disgraceful condition and has been for at least 20 years. It is at once arrogant, overbearing and mired in self-doubt, like the worst of playground bullies.

Protecting people’s life, liberty and property is the state’s core function, yet violent crime and car burglaries are on the rise and the police are pursuing priorities that infuriate Middle England. Javid must relaunch zero-tolerance policing; he should recruit a high-profile crime-busting US police chief such as Bill Bratton to help in his endeavours.

On migration, the Home Office has no idea of who is entering or leaving the UK, cannot expel foreign criminals, and has disgraced itself by making life miserable for far too many legal immigrants and British citizens. It is too soft when it should be tough, and too tough when it should be soft.

Javid should pledge to use all the powers at his disposal to move or sack the least effective of its senior civil servants, promote the better ones and bring in a team of consultants from the likes of Mckinsey to urgently restructure his new department. If he allows existing personnel and processes to remain in place, he will have lost before he has even started.

But the crisis is also one of policy. He needs to work out why the Windrush scandal happened, and where other similar acts of gross injustice are taking place. At the same time, Javid, who has already dropped the “hostile environment” terminology in favour of a more sensible “compliant environment” phrasing, must remind the public that he remains committed to combating illegal immigration. His task is to discover a more effective and humane way of doing so.

For years, the UK has had an idiotic immigration policy premised on targets that are, by definition, impossible to meet. Nobody can control net migration – the difference between the people who arrive and those who leave. This number is affected by British citizens returning from an expat posting in Dubai just as much as by the arrival of somebody from Poland. The target makes no distinction between highly educated and lowly qualified migrants, and includes students. It is fundamentally dishonest. Javid will not be able to achieve anything unless he ditches it, a move that will necessitate a showdown with Mrs May.

But such a reform cannot happen in a void. The public wants greater control over immigration; it wants to reduce overall numbers; and it wants to favour higher-skilled migrants. Javid’s job is to show that it is possible to do all of this, which means that he needs to choose, rush out and begin to sell a plan to radically reform immigration post-brexit. The opportunity could hardly be greater: to many people, his vision will be the first tangible sign of how the country will change post-referendum. If he gets it right, Javid could reignite Brexiteer enthusiasm and bring millions of centrists onside, too.

The biggest mistake so far in his career was to back Remain, betraying his Eurosceptic beliefs: in true investment banking style, he decided that the best way to accelerate his career was to make himself indispensable to George Osborne. His new role gives the perfect opportunity to show Tory members that he is, in fact, one of them, while remaining palatable to Remainers by campaigning for a liberal, free-market, pro-globalisation Brexit.

Can Javid pull all of this off, and emerge as the Tories’ saviour? He will have plenty of rivals, and the odds remain stacked against him. But there is no doubt that his promotion has suddenly made Tory politics exciting again.