The bodyguard opens the door of the armoured black limousine and out steps Sajid Javid; sleek, immaculately tailored, assured. Britain’s home secretary strides across the manicured lawns at a science campus outside London; doors swing open in front of him, his entourage in his wake.
Javid holds Britain’s archetypal establishment job; he oversees the country’s secrets and its borders. When Theresa May’s stricken premiership finally ends, the 49-year-old is viewed as one of the favourites to succeed her.
He is a multimillionaire who took a steep pay cut from his job at Deutsche Bank to go into politics, yet the man hoping to walk through the door of Number 10 has a surprising confession to make. It would probably sound strange sitting here as home secretary that you sometimes feel a little bit like an outsider, but I guess it is a bit like that still.
Javid, who barely needs to open a door himself these days, spent most of his young life having them slammed in his face. Behind the smooth exterior is a politician who grew up on a Bristol street once dubbed by a newspaper the most dangerous street in Britain.
He has risen to the highest levels of government despite the doubts of teachers, career counsellors and others, he says. They’d say, You can’t do that.
Now it is an open secret in Westminster that Javid, whose Pakistani father was a bus driver and who was advised at school to become a television repairman, is preparing to launch an assault on the highest office in the land.
But ambition has earned him enemies. Eurosceptics, furious that he backed Remain in the 2016 referendum, claim he is trying to play both sides of the argument, earning him the nickname “Slippery Saj”.
His handling of the 2016 steel industry crisis, when he was business secretary, saw him portrayed as an uncaring Thatcherite: the Labour MP Stephen Kinnock says Javid’s approach was “based on a toxic blend of indifference and incompetence”. Even Tory sympathisers say his public-speaking style is soporific.
Javid, the first person of colour to hold any of Britain’s great offices of state, dismisses the noise surrounding the Conservatives’ unofficial leadership contest. He insists that he is only focused on his current job, but a Freudian slip gives the game away: “My father passed away a couple of years after I was PM,” he says. “MP,” he laughs, correcting himself. “I said MP.” © PA Home Secretary Sajid Javid at Dover
His drive is apparent. But for his critics, the question remains: does he have the judgment or skills to make it to the top?
Javid has come to a GlaxoSmithKline site at Stevenage, just north of London, to explain how his post-Brexit immigration policy will still allow companies such as the British pharmaceutical giant to get the skilled workers they need from abroad. Although Javid wants a more liberal regime than May, it is a system that patently would not have allowed his father Abdul who arrived at Heathrow in 1961 with only a £1 note in his pocket — to come to the UK.
The Javid family settled in Rochdale in the north of England, where Abdul worked in a cotton mill (the country was desperately short of manual workers at the time) and later as a bus driver. Not long after, they headed south to Bristol, where the young Sajid and his four brothers who went on to successful careers in property, retail, finance and the police lived with his parents in a two-bedroom flat above their shop, which sold women’s clothes.
“When I look back and reflect on it, it was crowded, he says. But you don’t really know anything different. He says he only became conscious of the cramped conditions when he went to friends’ houses for sleepovers. “But I knew that’s what my parents could afford.
© Getty Sajid Javid is criticised by his colleagues as having no convictions
He was beaten up by a racist bully at school much later on, in adulthood, the man apologised but Javid has happy memories of his childhood, much of which was spent playing out on the local streets. I didn’t think it was tough at the time. It was a lovely home. I had lots of friends, both on my street and in school.
Though he now owns two properties in London and one in his constituency of Bromsgrove, Javid insists he still feels at home on Bristol’s Stapleton Road where he grew up, in a cosmopolitan district with a large Pakistani community; he occasionally pops into the Monte Carlo Café where he used to play pinball as a youngster.
Javid’s conversational style involves staccato bursts of dialogue and an intense stare. Both are to the fore as he recalls how he ran into a wall of opposition as he tried to plot a route out of Stapleton Road, including from the teachers who were supposed to nurture aspiration.
Maybe they were trying to make sure you didn’t get too high expectations and then be disappointed, he says, generously. When he rejected the suggested career in TV repairs, his teachers advised him against taking the three A-levels he needed to get to university. They said, ‘Well, we think you can only do two.
Javid, who still has a soft Bristol burr he pronounces “was” as “wuz” had to enrol himself at a local college to continue his studies; by this point, he was already immersing himself in the country’s politics and economics. In the evenings, he would sit with his father, a big fan of Margaret Thatcher, to watch the news and discuss Britain’s industrial decline.
Javid has a portrait of the Iron Lady by his desk at the Home Office and also owes Thatcher for his early interest in finance. He persuaded his father to borrow £500 from the bank so he could buy shares in the newly privatised industries, nipping down to the local library at the weekend to read the FT. He built up a share portfolio but kept this unlikely teenage pastime from his friends.
After succeeding in his A-levels, Javid says he was then told: “Don’t apply to universities that are hard to get into.” He studied economics and politics at Exeter, where he met a group of young Thatcherite Tories who later became influential in the party.
Among them were two future MPs: Rob Halfon who became George Osborne’s private secretary in 2014 and David Burrowes, who founded the Conservative Christian Fellowship while at Exeter with fellow student Tim Montgomerie (now a political commentator).
“He was incredibly hard-working but fun and decent,” Halfon remembers. “He had friends outside politics. He was driven.” In 1990, Javid was thrown out of a Tory party conference when he and his friends protested against British participation in the ERM, a precursor to the euro; it was to be the start of his long and tortured relationship with Europe.
Javid’s struggle to break down closed doors also manifested itself in his private life, where some warned that his relationship with his future wife was doomed. He met Laura, with whom he now has four children three daughters and a son on a summer placement at Commercial Union, the insurance company. Love blossomed over a communal stapler.
The future home secretary adopted an unusual seduction technique. He recalls telling Laura: Look, I’m only going to give you this stapler if you have a tuna sandwich with me or something.” Not everyone supported their relationship. People would say, Are you sure you want to marry her? It could be difficult. She’s white. Don’t you think you should stick to your own kind?
The sound of doors slamming continued as Javid attempted to enter a world of banking that was on the cusp of a revolution. People said I should think about high-street banking, he recalls. The City is going to be a bit tough. You don’t really have the background.
I did have interviews with two British merchant banks, Rothschild and Kleinwort Benson, he says, adding that his prospective employers were unimpressed by his father’s line of work.
At least I got an interview, but I felt very uncomfortable. In the Rothschild interview, they were all pinstriped, public-school, middle-aged white men. I found it hard to connect and I think they obviously weren’t going to connect.
Javid believes it is “significant” that he got his break from a US bank Chase Manhattan which, unlike its UK counterparts, saw his background as an advantage rather than a drawback.
Later, he met the man who had hired him and asked him why: He said something that has always stuck with me, Because you didn’t have green wellies and you had hunger in your belly.
By the age of 25, he’d become a vice-president at Chase, based in New York. He then moved to Deutsche in London at a time of rapid expansion for the European bank, which was squaring up to US rivals by poaching staff from Wall Street with a mandate to innovate and be creative.
It was a fiercely competitive atmosphere, with departments vying for market share and engaging in internecine warfare at a global level, according to one former colleague.
Based in the emerging markets team within Deutsche’s fixed income division, Javid was plunged into the Wild West of banking. Nearly all your salary was paid as bonus, so there were huge incentives to make money, the former colleague remembers. Deutsche at that time was the birthplace of the credit default swap. There were lots of smart people trying to outdo each other, relentlessly creating new products.
Another Deutsche colleague remembers Javid as ambitious. The biggest thing about Sajid was his people skills. He was curious, alive, warm, built good bonds and good relationships. His talent was not so much in the mathematical wizardry that made some other traders famous; instead, he inspired loyalty in his teams and spurred them on to success.
He didn’t invent or pioneer anything that I can remember, the former colleague adds. I just think of him as a very solid and strong part of the team.
While much has been made of Javid’s position as one of the very few senior Conservatives of colour, the opposite was true in Deutsche’s international workforce. It was perhaps the time in his life when the future home secretary felt least like an outsider.
We had an incredible number of minorities and different nationalities and so, actually, when he was here, he was one of the most English ones, a third former colleague says. “A large proportion of people that worked there at the time were from India, Russia, from all over the place. So he didn’t come across as a minority or any different in that sense at all.”
Javid refuses to disclose his pay but he has never denied the widespread reports that when he quit his job to become an MP for the West Midlands seat of Bromsgrove in 2010 he was earning about £3m a year. “I’m not getting into my pay,” he says. You can speculate.
When he arrived at Westminster, Javid was initially reluctant to talk about his “backstory”, thinking it irrelevant, but he says he accepts that people wanted to know what made him tick. Some Tory MPs say that it is still one of the only things they know about him. “Yes, he’s the son of a Pakistani bus driver,” says one. “We know that, but we need to know a bit more.”
If you ask Tory MPs about whether Javid is prime ministerial material, the answer tends to fall into the category: “Yes, but . . .” One rising MP from the 2015 general election intake says:
“I like Saj but he has never found a way to turn his amazing life story into a platform to tell a big story about what he would like to do with the country.”
A veteran Tory MP nods in agreement: “What does he stand for?” A former cabinet minister wanders across to join the conversation: “He’s a bit managerial, mechanistic. You don’t have to be the prophet Isaiah, but you need a bit of vision.”
For example, he is more liberal on immigration than May; and the supposed fiscal hawk raised some eyebrows when he suggested the government borrow £50bn to spend on new homes. “Funny money has a tendency to turn into real money,” sighs one Treasury mandarin.
Rob Halfon says his friend’s political views have evolved since their days at Exeter University. “It’s lazy to say that he is a pure Thatcherite now. The difference is that he now believes that economic and social capital have to go hand in hand. He’s a free marketer but he thinks that society is broken and he believes in social justice.”
Javid makes no apology for this political shape-shifting: “I’ve become much less ideological, just pragmatic,” he says.
Javid was identified as a rising star by George Osborne, the former chancellor, who ensured he made a swift and effortless rise through the ministerial ranks, moving from a junior role at the Treasury to culture secretary and then secretary of state for business. “He’s a good decision maker, he’s full of bright ideas,” says a fellow cabinet minister.
But the 2016 Brexit referendum was to prove Javid’s Achilles heel. For Eurosceptics, it suggested a willingness to sell out his principles in the interests of his career. “With Brexit, it’s a head and heart thing with Sajid,” says Halfon. “His heart says out, but his head says in.” Pro-Brexit Tories had long assumed Javid would join the Leave campaign. In the end, after agonising, he backed Remain.
Osborne held at least two meetings with Javid to make it clear to his wobbling colleague that it would be completely unacceptable for a Conservative business secretary to advocate Brexit, when virtually every big company in the land backed Remain. It was dubbed “Operation Sajid”, recalls one friend of the former chancellor. “George got the thumbscrews out.”
Javid insists his decision “wasn’t based on David Cameron or Osborne pressurising me”, or the expectation at the time that Remain would win, or that he would be sacked if he backed Leave, but on a hard-headed economic judgment. “I don’t regret my decision at all,” Javid says. He says his focus now is on delivering the Brexit decision.
To this day, he is mistrusted by Tory Eurosceptics, who are unconvinced by his recent efforts to strike tough poses on Brexit. “Saj has brilliant PR but few real convictions,” says one senior figure on the pro-Brexit Tory European Research Group.
“He entered the House as a staunch Eurosceptic, then in 2016 he completely bottled it. The next leader has to be a Brexiteer. When it mattered, Saj was a Remainer. End of.”
Amid the political rubble that constituted the Conservative party after the 2016 Brexit vote, Javid backed the long-forgotten leadership campaign of Stephen Crabb, once seen as a rising star of the Tory centre-left, then forlornly waited to be sacked after Theresa May seized the party crown from the departing Cameron.
May, the former home secretary, had never much liked Javid. She despised Osborne, who tried to frustrate her attempts to clamp down on immigration, and Javid was his protégé. Javid’s stock had also fallen earlier that year over his initial reluctance to bail out the ailing British steel industry. “He’s an ultra-Thatcherite libertarian,” says Stephen Kinnock, who, as MP for Aberavon, represents workers at the Port Talbot plant.
But against Javid’s expectations — possibly related to the fact that May’s promise to tackle inequality might ring hollow if she appointed an almost exclusively white cabinet — the prime minister gave him the local government portfolio. He says he has no idea why May kept him on: “We’re not the best of buddies. But then that’s not my objective. The cabinet functions well when you’ve got good people around the table who take their jobs seriously and you’ve got a prime minister who gives it her all.”
In 2018, Javid was promoted by May to his current post in the wake of the so-called Windrush scandal. Amber Rudd was forced to quit as home secretary over the mistreatment by her department over many years of British citizens who arrived from the Caribbean in the 1950s and 1960s to fill a labour shortage and who suffered under the “hostile environment” created by May during her six years at the Home Office.
Putting Javid in charge at such a sensitive time made sense, given his personal background, but for May it meant handing over her old department and immigration policy to a man who was now almost unsackable.
Javid disowned the “hostile environment” policy, although critics say that elements persist. He then overthrew May’s longstanding opposition to the legalisation of cannabis for medicinal use. “I don’t care what she says,” Javid told friends at the time.
“I want to change people’s views of the Home Office that we are trying to keep people out,” he says. He strongly disagrees with May that “highly skilled” workers should be defined as anyone earning more than £30,000: he wants the threshold to be set much lower. By the time the policy is finalised, May could be gone.
His liberal instincts on immigration stem from a belief in free markets as much as from his own background. On other subjects, he has seemed further to the right than some of his cabinet peers. Last year he was criticised for tweeting about “sick Asian paedophiles” in reference to the conviction of a Huddersfield grooming gang.
The Labour MP David Lammy said: “By singling out ‘Asians’ he not only panders to the far right but increases the risk of violence and abuse against minorities across the country . . . Paedophilia is an abhorrent crime that affects all communities.”
Javid also prompted concern from human rights groups after deciding not to require assurances from the US government that a pair of British Isis militants would not face the death penalty if they were extradited.
As home secretary, he faces multiple challenges: he will have to manage Brexit arrangements in security and at the border, battle a significant rise in murder and violence after more than a decade of falling crime levels — police chiefs blame cuts made during May’s time at the Home Office — and lobby tech companies to fight terrorism and child sexual exploitation online.
Officials say they feel he has their back; their only concern is whether he has the necessary focus to keep abreast of everything put in front of him. “Whatever you think of Theresa May, she was on top of the detail. You put something in the box, and she read it,” one says. “He doesn’t have the same reputation for fearlessly ploughing on with the work whatever it takes.”
Most Tory MPs believe one of the candidates on a final two-person shortlist for the next prime minister will be a hardline Brexiter — maybe Michael Gove, Boris Johnson or Dominic Raab. But Javid is the frontrunner to be the other name: a more centrist, Brexit-lite candidate, capable of uniting both wings of a party that is in danger of ripping itself apart, battling for that slot with foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt.
His enemies are waiting. “Number 10 are out to get him,” says one cabinet minister, observing that May wanted to clip Javid’s wings. When a relatively small number of migrants crossed the English Channel over Christmas, Downing Street made it clear that Javid should return from a luxury holiday in South Africa to deal with it. The Javid camp believe Number 10 briefed the press on details of his trip, said to include an £840 a person a night stay in Kruger National Park.
Javid says he never even made it to the safari part of his holiday. Stories appeared around the same time that Javid had begun referring to himself as “The Saj” in meetings. “I’ve never called myself The Saj,” he says with mock seriousness. “But I’ve noticed a lot of people do. I was even thinking of changing my Twitter handle to The Saj.”
Then there is his austere public persona, which gives no glimpse of his more engaging private side. His speeches are delivered with the flair of a speak-your-weight machine. “He’s the most boring speaker in the cabinet,” says one mainstream Tory MP.
The home secretary has been taking lessons to improve his delivery, say allies, but the results have so far gone unnoticed by colleagues. At the last Tory conference, there were empty seats for a flat speech in which he accidentally vowed to “fight hope”.
“I think I can improve,” he says. “I think I have improved a bit with practice.” He admires the fluency of Michael Gove, the environment secretary who honed his oratory at the Oxford Union, and acknowledges: “I think it’s something I can invest more in and think more about, because communication is key as a politician.”
For all the criticism of his stiff manner and his political flexibility, some believe he can still reach the political summit. One cabinet minister says: “He can reach parts of the party that others can’t reach.
“When it’s going well for Saj, the moderates in the party like him for what he represents. The right like him because he is as dry as dust and has proper Conservative values.”
A lot depends on whether the vacancy arises in the midst of the Brexit crisis or at a calmer moment. Another cabinet minister says: “If there was a leadership contest now, it wouldn’t be Saj — it would be a Brexiteer. It helps him if it’s post-Brexit.”
Another government figure says that while Hunt may have more charm than Javid, the latter has a steelier edge. “You can imagine Jeremy being told that a plane with terrorists on board is heading towards London with fighter planes on its tail and being asked what to do, and he would say, ‘Well . . . ’ Saj would say, ‘Shoot it down.’”
Trevor Phillips, former head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, who knows the home secretary, has a hunch that being an outsider could ultimately work to Javid’s advantage: If you come from the outside and you work on the premise that you will never be part of the club, you work in a way which means you never have to rely on anyone, he says. “Therefore, nobody can let you down.
When asked by the FT if he’d like to be PM, Javid does not deny it outright, instead adopting the familiar politician’s manoeuvre of answering a different question.
Well, I like being home secretary, I love that job. But most ambitious ministers dream of leading the country, don’t they?
Well, you meet many of them, so if that’s what you think, he replies, smiling. Look, I’m focused on this job.
Javid apologises that he has to return to London for further Brexit meetings and heads towards his armoured car. The door is already open for him.