Much has changed over the past year for Sajid Javid. His frenemy Theresa May resigned as prime minister in June and is now back in her constituency, investigating potholes on the roads and apparently enjoying the challenge.
She is yet another Tory woman over whose political corpse Javid has stepped – this time from Home Secretary to Chancellor of the Exchequer (at least for now).
Originally, Javid had sought to replace May himself and in the summer Tory leadership contest he made a brave showing. His “life story” as the hard-working, successful son of poor immigrants was seen in the media as strong medicine – much stronger than Boris Johnson’s sunny Eton and Oxford stroll through life.
Javid, even as an ex-banker, was almost invulnerable to the usual accusations of privilege and poshness hurled across the house of Commons at Conservatives from the competing set (of mostly public-school Oxbridge graduates) on the Opposition benches.
Yet he lost decisively to the Johnson in July, along with all the other candidates. The GG2 Power List wrote last year that Javid would make an ideal leader for the Conservative Party. It is an opinion still firmly held, except that the theatre of combat has changed significantly over the last twelve months, so that a “prorogation” of ambition is probably wise on Javid’s part.
In fact, it is highly probable that in losing the contest for the prime ministership this time around, he has dodged a bullet. Boris Johnson by becoming PM may have done Javid a huge favour.
On one hand, if Johnson survives prorogation and the interminable Brexit soap opera, Javid is enhanced rather than damaged by having flown as Johnson’s alert wingman in the new Battle of Britain.
On the other, if Johnson loses and, as he promised, dies in a ditch – having pinned his premiership and legacy to the martyrdom of Brexit uber alles – the Tory top-spot comes free and Javid’s way is clear to almost certain victory as Conservative leader in an up-coming election, with hostile voters split between a hopelessly divided Labour Party and the resurgent LibDems.
Despite all the explosions and bombs flying overhead at the moment, Javid is sitting pretty in his bunker at No. 11.
Javid’s parliamentary career began in 2010 when he was elected from Bromsgrove into David Cameron’s new, Blairite-lite coalition government. British politicians, following the expenses scandals and the Gordon Brown Experience, were then as now in the doldrums of public opinion.
But Javid was guilty of being a former banker – an even more despised breed in the wake of the great financial crisis – and said on entering Parliament for the first time that, “I was the only member of the new intake who was moving into a more popular profession!”
In becoming an MP he hopped over the political corpse of his first “fallen woman”, in this instance ex- Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Julie Kirkbride, one of the MPs done in by dodgy expense claims.
Javid always had a lot going for him in Parliament. He was a real-world success and a self-made man, earning a reported £3 million a year at Deutsche Bank when he entered politics. He swallowed a virtuous 98 per cent pay cut to serve his country. In addition to that he was a rare BAME Tory. He quickly became Parliamentary Private Secretary to John Hayes at Business. The next year he was made PPS to Chancellor George Osborne.
It didn’t take long for Javid’s move toward the UK’s penultimate political address to begin in earnest.
The hapless Economic Secretary Chloe Smith soon made way for him at the Treasury after stumbling over fuel duty and ministerial flight costs on TV. (Apparently Cameron had thought she was an accountant. She wasn’t.) That first appointment in 2012 gave Javid a tentative foothold in government, and the ex-banker, ambitious and competent, was swiftly promoted to Financial Secretary.
Two years later, in 2014, another woman tripped and went down hard. Maria Miller, a newly found-out expenses offender, handed Javid the baton of Secretary of State at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
Javid was now in the Cabinet and could look Cameron in the eye.
The look said that Javid was a money man, not really “Minister-for-Fun”, and in less than a year, following the 2015 general election victory and Vince Cable’s downfall, Javid was promoted to the more serious position of Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, (and President of the Board of Trade), where he soon proved himself competent and ambitious.
Then, in 2016, David Cameron fell on his sword after the failed gambit of the Brexit referendum shredded his reputation. Theresa May soon replaced him as PM.
There was “history” between Theresa May and Javid. Her eyes were already narrowing at him when she was Home Secretary because of his opposition to what The Spectator called May’s attempts to “adapt huge chunks of Ed Miliband’s agenda” and return the party to the “stultifying corporatism of the Heath era.” Javid had not backed down.
Now she was in charge, May made it her business to move Javid, who was after all ambitious and competent, sideways and slightly down to the less threatening position at Housing, Communities and Local Government. It was at this point that karma began to wreak its revenge on her.
The horrific Grenfell Tower fire a week after the general election should have also incinerated Javid’s career as new Secretary of State for Housing. But if Theresa May believed that it would hurt him more than her, she was mistaken. In fact, a great service was rendered to Javid by his housing minister, Alok Sharma, who broke down while delivering a Commons statement about the deaths and innocently deflected public anger away from Javid and back at Number 10 and May herself.
But that was merely the second recent piece of karma that manifested itself in Javid’s favour. The first had been May’s hubristic decision to call for a snap general election in the first place and then to run the worst campaign in living memory.
She lost the Conservative Party’s comfortable majority in the House of Commons, and her judgement was forever-after placed in doubt.
May was now too weak to demote Javid any further, giving him great room to manoeuvre; and then her catastrophic Brexit negotiation saga commenced.
But karma was not finished with punishing May and rewarding Javid.
The recently re-resigned Amber Rudd had been May’s choice as Home Secretary in 2016 but she was fatally holed below the waterline by the surfacing of the Windrush scandal in early 2018. Rudd was gone by April.
Harassing and threatening deportation for long-time UK-Caribbean citizens of colour (and their children) was part of May’s previous “get tough on foreigners” outlook and a legacy of her extended tenure at the Home Office.
May called her immigration policy the “hostile environment”, but it transpired the Home office (in 2010, under May herself) had destroyed exculpatory documents relating to the original Windrush passengers’ legal naturalisations.
Rudd was sinking after the scandal broke but May also needed rescuing (the water was lapping at her feet, too). Javid, whose ethnicity was like oil on these troubled waters, proved to be the only suitable lifeboat around, and into Marsham Street he moved, promising to banish May’s callous hostile environment approach. There was nothing May could have done but offer him the job. Karma again.
With Rudd’s departure Javid had had leaped over yet another prone female, somewhat to his surprise. “First of all, big changes in government only tend to come around at reshuffle time and we’d just had one,” he explained to GG2. “I was very happy to stay in my then-job, which was Local Government and Housing Secretary. And then as people know, this job came across in a sad way really, because I’m a big fan of Amber Rudd and she’s a good friend of mine.”
It was perhaps as Home Secretary that Javid’s full potential benefit to the Conservative Party came clear.
He was now a British Asian occupying one of the great Offices of State, and as such pure gold in PR terms for the government, much as Priti Patel had been over at the Department for International Development before May had demanded her resignation. (What an irony – and another piece of boomerang karma for May – that Patel is now Home Secretary).
Vitally, Javid was not religious in any way – he calls himself a non-practising Muslim – meaning that his immunity to accusations of racism was supercharged by the fact that he felt no need to pay obeisance to religious pressure groups. This made him an appealing contrast, as a social liberal and fiscal conservative, to that other son-of-a-bus-driver, London Mayor Sadiq Khan, the socially conservative (and religious) Muslim voice on the Left.
When the Muslim Council of Britain came calling, for example, demanding an inquiry into Conservative Islamophobia, Javid simply swatted them away. “The Muslim Council of Britain does not represent Muslims in this country,” he said, accurately. “We don’t deal with the MCB.” (Sadiq Khan, by contrast, had been chair of the MCB’s legal affairs committee.) No white politician could have dared to be so blunt.
Javid’s private life, too, is a political fairy tale: he married his white-British, church-going wife, Laura, after their eyes met over the office stapler on a student summer job. His children – the couple has four – were unapologetically sent to private schools. “We do what's best for them,” says Javid with a frankness and guile that electrifies Conservatives.
The man is also quick-witted, delivering memorable and inventive speeches, and is disarmingly modest and funny. He said to his wife one day, “Laura, did you ever imagine, in your wildest dreams, that one day I would actually be a Member of Parliament?” Javid said she looked him up and down and replied, “Darling, in my wildest dreams you don’t feature at all.”
The fact that Javid has so many bullet-proof salients and non-stick surfaces to his political profile explains how he has weathered so well the various misfortunes that have, inevitably, come his way.
At first there were stumbles and mis-steps, perhaps the big one trying to save Port Talbot steelworks in 2016, when he was Business Secretary, with a sort-of-promise of public money, after first appearing to be caught completely off-guard by events (he was on vacation). It was an attempt that led Labour’s Angela Eagle to ridicule him and claim that the plant’s interim survival was all “the hard work of the steel unions and the plant management.”
He stands firm with Boris Johnson on Brexit now, but originally disavowed it in 2016 after a cloistered meeting with his political allies and sponsors George Osborne and David Cameron.
Memorably, Javid emerged to face the cameras and stammer and stutter his loyalty to Brussels, proving in a touching manner that he was a terrible liar. But it marked him for a time as Javid the Flip-Flopper.
But while he was in Marsham Street Javid instead revealed himself as a robust but liberal-minded Home Secretary.
He came down hard on Muslim grooming gangs and jihadists’ rights but was tender towards parents needing cannabis medication for their sick children and skilled immigrants who wanted to work and settle here: just the right mix, in fact – and one that seems instinctive with him – to woo the greater part of the tolerant-to-an-extent British public.
Javid’s political fearlessness on immigration and diversity had the effect of stealing Labour’s clothes.
“I’m a great fan of all communities and races and religions in Britain because whilst they have their differences, the one thing they have in common is that they are all British,” Javid said.
“I saw, for example, in my old role as Communities Secretary, that there’s lots of great examples of communities that have settled in Britain and contributed a lot and mixed in with everyone else, so to speak. But there’s also, sadly, too many examples, still, of segregation and isolation in some communities. Which is bad for that community, but is also bad for the wider society.”
When the Conservatives (meaning Javid) can express such sentiments and not be denounced as racist, Labour is in trouble.
The Conservatives desperately need to win the trust of ethnic voters in an upcoming Brexit-themed or even post-Brexit election, which will arrive soon.
Might ethnic minorities be correct to assume that the Tories would give them something concrete in return for their support, while Labour simply expects it and nothing changes?
“The Labour Party has taken minority voters for granted,” he says, “and you see that every day in Parliament when they talk in debate, and some of their policies, they just assume that if your skin is not white, you’ll vote Labour. Of course, for a minority voter, like anyone else, they think about what’s good for them in terms of politics and who they should vote for,” adds Javid, the walking antidote to identity politics.
A Muslim-background Asian leading the Tories into battle, then, would be Labour’s worst nightmare – except in the next election, which will probably be decided on attitudes to the EU regardless of whether the UK is still in (“Let’s get out!”) or already out (“Let’s get back in!”).
That is why Boris Johnson is the perfect armour for Javid to wear in this battle. Javid could very well be Britain’s first Asian prime minister, but he should not want to tarnish himself in this Brexit bear-pit. Best leave it to Boris.
In his spending review, revealed back in September, Javid announced that he was ending the era of Tory austerity inaugurated in 2010. That includes re-hiring the 20,000 police who, to the delight and opportunity of the thieves, stabbers and gangs of the UK, were laid off under Cameron and May.
Javid then followed up by easing visa restrictions on foreign students from a four-month stay post-graduation to two years (unravelling yet more of Theresa May’s Home Office policy-making), indicating that he finds immigrants valuable rather than enemies of the state.
It would not be too fanciful to describe these sensible and welcome announcements as the perfect way in which to lay the table for his leadership bid, all the while bolstering and supporting the current prime minister, Boris Johnson, who is under determined siege by the media and opposition parties – and even by a significant section of Conservatives.
Sajid Javid, it might be said, holds the delicate balance of power at a crucial inflexion point in the country’s history. In a sense he is already almost prime minister, and even if he does not ultimately lead the nation, it certainly qualifies him to be Number One in the GG2 Power List.
