I don't suppose you lot know about our new home secretary Sajid Javid yet do you? You're going to love this Muslim son of a bus driver...
The new home secretary, Sajid Javid, the first BAME holder of one of the great offices of state, will find an inbox brimming not just with the backlash over the Windrush scandal, but with arguments to come over policing cuts and rising knife crime as well as a difficult counter-terror climate.
Born in Rochdale in 1969, the former investment banker and Margaret Thatcher devotee, is on the right of the Conservative party. His appointment will give him a voice on the powerful cabinet subcommittee on Brexit and will keep the balance of EU leavers and remainers in the top offices, but he can only be categorised as a remainer in the most technical sense.
Javid backed remain in the referendum, probably under pressure from David Cameron, saying it was with a “heavy heart and no enthusiasm”. He has since swung firmly behind leavers in the cabinet.
His instincts were always Eurosceptic. His university friend and Tory colleague Robert Halfon recalled him being thrown out of the party conference as a young activist for handing out anti-European exchange rate mechanism leaflets.
Like the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, he is a Muslim son of a bus driver who has risen to the top of British politics. His parents were born in India, but fled to Pakistan while small children. His father arrived in Britain in the 1960s – Javid has said he came with £1 in his pocket.
His other hero apart from Thatcher is Ayn Rand – he recounted once that he regularly rereads the courtroom scene from her novel The Fountainhead, telling the Spectator he admired its description of “the power of the individual … sticking up for your beliefs, against popular opinion”.
Javid came into politics having been the former head of credit trading at Deutsche Bank, which the Evening Standard once estimated had required him to take a 98% pay cut.
Like many in the cabinet, he is thought to be privately sceptical of the pledge to reduce migration to the tens of thousands. Speaking in the Commons seven hours into the job, Javid said he did have concerns about the rhetoric. He would not be using the phrase “hostile environment,” he said, calling it “unhelpful, it doesn’t represent our values as a country”.
The phrase was used extensively by May in the Home Office, a hint Javid is prepared to break with the prime minister. Asked by Tory MP Nick Boles if he would “retire some legacy policies”, Javid replied he was “certainly putting on my own stamp”.
However, there is little hard evidence that he is preparing to dismantle May’s strategy in principle, saying previously there is “nothing racist about managed migration”. In parliament, he has consistently backed the government’s policies to enforce tighter restrictions on immigration.
On migration, his main interest is integration, a subject on which he oversaw a government green paper at the former Department for Communities and Local Government.
A Muslim Thatcherite?
