ONE could argue that had it not been for former health sectary Matt Hancock’s ‘indiscretion’ (with aide Gina Coladangelo) in front of Home Office security cameras, Sajid Javid might have still remained on the backbenches.
His elevation to health secretary in June 2021 came off the back of Hancock’s resignation.
Initially, prime minister Boris Johnson’s instincts had been to protect Hancock, but once pictures were published of the MP getting just a bit intimate from someone outside his household – and thereby breaking Covid regulations – there seemed little point to holding onto him.
Assessments of Hancock’s role in navigating the pandemic remain very mixed and hardly anyone (bar the government’s most ardent supporters) would claim the crisis was well-handled, especially at the start.
So, Javid is back in the cabinet and at the top table. He has proved himself again as one of the government’s best communicators and a real asset as we make our way out of the most challenging of times on the health front.
From here on things won’t get any easier – the scale of the challenges are enormous.
Some six million people are waiting for routine or at least non-urgent treatment. This represents the largest number of people waiting – since these types of records were compiled (going back to 2007).
In one month alone for January 2022, the figure jumped to 72,000. In February 2022, he announced the government’s plan to deal with the backlog, conceding the list would go up before it went down – estimating that should happen around March 2024.
He told the House of Commons there would be £2 billion in extra funding and another £8bn over the next three years – some £6bn would also be spent on capital investment with an emphasis on new technology and creating more bed capacity.
New surgical hubs are being created to deal with the backlog and cancer care – sometimes described as being among the worst in the western advanced economies – would be tackled head on with more testing and 95 per cent of patients getting diagnoses within six weeks and treatments soon after. Urgent GP referrals for possible cancers must be improved, he said.
There is now a government 10-year Cancer Plan, launched on World Cancer Day on February 4 this year and he revealed that in part he was personally dedicated to this because he had lost his own father to cancer.
In his statement to parliament about the government’s Recovery plan, he said: “We are absolutely committed to tackling the Covid backlog and building a health and social care system for the long term.
“Our Covid Backlog Recovery Plan will help the NHS reduce waiting times, give patients more control over their care, and harness innovative technology to free up staff time so they can care for more people up and down the country can get the treatment they need.”
Among other changes, patients would be able to see where they are in NHS waiting lists through a new platform, My Planned Care – initially as a website and then through the NHS app. Javid may benefit from a much better perceived handling of the pandemic in what appeared its final phase since the outbreak in March 2020.
While Johnson has made the final decisions, Javid must have played some positive part in bringing him to the conclusions he has arrived at.
Announcing the end of nearly all restrictions on February 22 2022, Javid reiterated to the House that Covid had not gone away and people needed to remain vigilant and cautious.
He said he would still wear a face mask in crowded spaces and should stay at home and not go to the office if they felt unwell.
On the previous evening, Johnson in one of his evening briefings had said that people testing positive did not legally need to isolate – but he cautioned against going to work or behaving as if everything was normal.
Free testing (for those not considered vulnerable) through the lateral flow kits looked set to end in April (at the time of going to press) and the more expensive lab tests also look set to be restricted to those with symptoms and/or entering hospital. NHS and care staff though were likely to be exempt and still get complimentary testing.
Not everyone was convinced and there was speculation that Javid had argued for the free tests to continue for a while longer, while Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Johnson said it cost too much.
As a former chancellor, Javid has always taken the economic case against tougher Covid restrictions very seriously – while he was careful not to criticise the government over lockdowns, he appeared sympathetic to that line of thinking – on the backbenches.
In a newsletter, (NHS) Road to Recovery, launched in late February, he said that he did not want to be known as the ‘Minister for Covid’, and reminded people he had been up and down the country visiting NHS hospitals and staff as they get back to normal, following the pandemic.
Javid had left the government in February 2020 after a row with Dominic Cummings – the prime minister’s chief political advisor at the time. Johnson had offered to retain Javid’s services so long as he fired all his special advisors and promised to work with those handpicked by Cummings and Number 10.
Javid rejected the idea and was appalled by the treatment of his aide Sonia Khan and in came Rishi Sunak to replace him.
However, the 2020 GG2 Power List No 1, remains an MP for the well-heeled, genteel Birmingham suburb that is Bromsgrove, and he kept himself busy on the backbenches, while maintaining a relatively low profile.
Despite his high standing in the party, and a failed bid to become leader in 2019 when the post came up and Johnson won, this time around, with all the speculation around Johnson and the implications of the police investigation into alleged parties during Covid, Javid’s name has rarely been mentioned.
Sunak and current foreign secretary Liz Truss have had far more column inches and air time devoted to this but for the record according to the Daily Mirror, the one-time chancellor who has held five senior positions within government (heading up Culture, Media and Sport between 2014-15; secretary for business, innovation and skills, 2015-16; secretary for hosing, communities and local government 2016-18; home secretary 2018-19; and finally before his most recent position, chancellor 2019-20) – has not totally ruled out a run should the position become vacant.
At a Covid press conference on the day that Tory grandee David Davis implored Johnson to resign, Javid insisted he had followed all the rules and felt the same pain and hurt others felt when they were informed of the prime minister’s possible law-breaking. He said he had not been able to go the funeral of a close friend because of the restrictions.
He side-stepped a direct question about his possible candidacy and repeated the mantra that there was no there was a leader in place – as the Mirror hinted hardly unequivocal rejection of the idea.
Born to Pakistani origin parents, who lived in a small terraced house in Bristol with their four sons, Javid made it to Exeter University and then the City of London where it was reported his salary was in millions.
He came into politics inspired by Margaret Thatcher – as are many of his generation – excited by her agenda of personal freedom and minimum state intervention.
Javid is almost literally a progeny of the Big Bang in the City that Thatcher, Thatcherism and then Chancellor Nigel Lawson, all nurtured and fostered. Some would argue the meritocratic culture and influx of non-English banking institutions would help the son of a bus driver make it to the top.
He has revealed he was quietly told to look elsewhere when he said he wanted to get a job in the City – he had no family connections and was educated at a bog standard comprehensive.
Javid become vice-president of Chase Manhattan Bank at the age of 25 and then moved to Deutsche Bank and was senior managing director before entering politics in 2009 and becoming an MP for the constituency of Bromsgrove, near Birmingham, in 2010.
His rise through the ranks has been near meteoric and in some ways the current chancellor Rishi Sunak is the only other politician who has progressed quite so rapidly.
Just two years after his own election to parliament, Javid was in government as economic secretary to the Treasury – and his first cabinet post came in 2014 as the head of culture, media and sport.
There were stints too at Business and Housing before landing the job he had long coveted – chancellor of the Exchequer in July 2019.
While Javid was away from frontline politics, he developed other interests and connections.
As well as taking up a post at Harvard University at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, which looks at how governments around the world can better cope with events such as a global pandemic, Javid also did less glamourous work on causes which interested him and give some a better idea of his political and social compass.
He chaired a charity report into child sexual exploitation, commented prominently on Islamophobia in the Conservative Party and is recognised as a politician who has addressed inequality and identity.
A source who worked with him on a Centre for Social Justice Commission on child sexual exploitation told Camilla Tominey, associate editor of the Telegraph, shortly after his elevation to the health job: “He saw in real time what the impact Covid has had on those most struggling.
“He saw the issue being described as saving lives versus saving the economy, when what he was trying to say was, it was about saving lives versus saving other lives.
“He’s seen the damage caused by lockdown and will not want to prolong it.”
Taken together with his more recent pronouncement that pandemic restrictions have harmed those already weak and vulnerable, it suggests that he does have some personal commitment to the government’s much purported ‘levelling up agenda’.
In May, he also asked his party to get its “house in order” with regards to Islamophobia, revealing that he had been blocked from a safe Conservative seat because some in the party believed constituents just wouldn’t vote for a Muslim background MP.
Previously, Javid has said very little in-depth about his religious beliefs except that his wife, Laura, whom he met during a summer job at insurance firm, Commercial Union in Bristol, and his four children, are practising Christians.
Responding to a report into Islamophobia carried out by Swaran Singh, a former equality and human rights commissioner, Javid agreed that anti-Muslim sentiment in the party was “unquestionably a problem”.
Singh found the Tories had a “Muslim problem” and put forward recommendations for tackling the issue.
Johnson has agreed to its implementation and apologised if he had caused offence to those who felt his comparison of Muslim women wearing the burka with letterboxes and robbers was wrong and bigoted.
Johnson made the analogy in his Daily Telegraph column, actually defending the right of Muslim women to dress as they wished.
Javid – in his article for the Times on the report – said a Tory association chairman had simply told him, “some members didn’t think locals would vote for a Muslim”.
It was two years ago that Javid bravely called on the party to launch an investigation into Islamophobia and sought the on-the-spot support of fellow Conservative Party candidates in the bid to replace Theresa May, which Johnson won.
Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, an influential organisation that does work on integration and immigration, identity and race, said Javid was one of the few politicians who addressed such as issues. Lamenting the lack of a national integration strategy, Katwala writing in Eastern Eye in May 2021, concluded that: “Some green shoots did emerge from Sajid Javid’s time as communities secretary.
“Pilot strategies in five local areas – Bradford, Blackburn with Darwen, Peterborough, Waltham Forest (London) and Walsall – did make a difference to resilience during Covid, according to a recent study for the Belong network.”
Katwala was commenting in the wake of the 20-year anniversary of the Oldham riots and work Ted Cantle had done citing “parallel lives”, where communities who live in the same area have very little to do with each other and became suspicious of each other as a consequence.
Javid had spoken to Katwala at a jointly hosted event with British Future and Eastern Eye in 2019 about the issue, as the Conservative leadership election was in full swing following Theresa May’s resignation.
During the debate, Javid was open about the benefits of immigration and has been a sane voice in extending student visas and allowing more doctors from India to work in the NHS.
He told the audience at the Royal Society that he was proud of his Pakistani roots and he enjoyed bhangra dancing and as someone of Punjabi heritage, perhaps, he could not say anything different.
Some of the issues raised during the debate were apparent during the by-election campaign in Batley & Spen in Yorkshire, which has a sizeable Muslim community.
Away from the broad challenges of pandemic, one other issue is already set to weigh heavily on Javid’s mind, even if he and the government would rather avoid it – and that is social care.
The government has promised to tackle it but every time the issue comes up, it has preferred to avoid making any substantial policy moves and has postponed action.
One former colleague of Javid’s told the Telegraph: “While there is no doubt Sajid will look to do a number of far-reaching reforms, I think he’s of the opinion we are at completely the wrong stage of the parliament now to suddenly launch a new social care strategy. He thinks the Tories need another election victory so they’ve got another four or five year term to do it properly.”
