Sajid Javid: how reluctant Remainer rose from poverty to the front bench

Sajid Javid grew up in a rundown part of Bristol as the son of a Pakistani immigrant, who raised his family of seven in a two-bedroom flat above a shop.

A school career adviser once told him he had a future as a television repair man. But on Monday, UK prime minister Theresa May picked Mr Javid to be Britain’s first-ever home secretary with an ethnic minority background.

At the weekend, the 48-year-old — whose first priority as home secretary will be to sort out the Windrush scandal — gave a well-timed interview to the Sunday Telegraph newspaper, saying he empathised with the victims, who could easily have been his family members.

Mr Javid’s father came to Britain in the 1960s with just £1 in his pocket, working in a cotton mill in Rochdale and later as a bus driver in Bristol, before running a women’s clothing business in Bedminster.

“I grew up on Stapleton Road in Bristol — also known as ‘Britain’s most dangerous street’ or a ‘moral cesspit’, depending on your tabloid of choice,” Mr Javid has said about his upbringing. “No one’s going to give you anything: you’ve got to go out there and earn it.”

By the time Mr Javid was first elected as the MP for Bromsgrove in 2010, he was already a successful investment banker, earning a reputed £3m a year running the Asian trading division of Deutsche Bank.

With a heavy heart and no enthusiasm, I shall be voting for the UK to remain a member of the European Union

Soon after joining parliament, he became a protégé of then-chancellor George Osborne, who gave him a succession of ministerial jobs, including parliamentary private secretary, junior Treasury minister, City minister, culture secretary and eventually business secretary.

Although he had a history of Euroscepticism, he repaid Mr Osborne’s loyalty in the run-up to the 2016 EU referendum by joining the Remain camp, albeit with no visible enthusiasm.

“With a heavy heart and no enthusiasm, I shall be voting for the UK to remain a member of the European Union,” he said at the time.

The outcome of the vote precipitated David Cameron’s resignation and a subsequent Conservative party leadership race, during which Mr Javid formed a joint leadership ticket with Stephen Crabb, the former work and pensions secretary. If successful, Mr Javid would have become chancellor — but the pair only had the support of 34 MPs and soon dropped out of the race, which was ultimately won by Mrs May.

The new prime minister immediately sacked Mr Osborne and demoted several of his acolytes as she sought to reinforce her own power. She shifted Mr Javid from the business department to the communities department, in what was seen in Westminster as a lateral move at best.

In that job — rebranded “housing secretary” — Mr Javid made several high-profile interventions, including calling on the government to borrow £50bn to embark on a historic housebuilding exercise. His suggestion was rebuffed by Number 10.

Mr Javid’s call for greater state intervention in the housing market was perhaps a surprising request by a one-time advocate of free markets — he is a devotee of Ayn Rand and her book The Fountainhead.

However, his ideology has been tested repeatedly since the steel crisis that erupted when he was business secretary in 2016.

Mr Javid had been in Australia giving a speech about the benefits of untrammelled capitalism when, back in the UK, Tata Steel threatened to withdraw from the UK with the potential loss of 11,000 jobs.

With Mr Javid’s job hanging in the balance, he started to consider various interventions to try to persuade Tata to stay in the country. In the end, Tata decided to stay put, albeit by merging its steel operations with those of ThyssenKrupp of Germany.

In his new role, Mr Javid will sit on the cabinet subcommittee that makes key decisions on Brexit policy — and all eyes will be on his long history of Euroscepticism.

As a 20-year-old he attended his first-ever Conservative party conference, where he campaigned against the decision to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, something he said he saw as a “fatal mistake”.

Even when he was campaigning for Remain, the minister called the EU a “failing project” and an “overblown bureaucracy”, arguing that the UK should never have joined in the first place.

But industry groups will take comfort from Mr Javid’s history of being pro-business, and his familiarity with the City of London in particular.

The new home secretary is also expected to demonstrate a reasonably liberal approach to immigration, arguing that it benefits the economy more than hurts it. Soon after the referendum, he said it was imperative that the flow of work visas for foreign construction workers should continue unimpeded.

Mr Javid is married with four children and does not practise any religion, though his parents are Muslim. Aides say he is adamant about spending time with his children despite the demands of his job.

In 2015, BuzzFeed reported that the minister had laid kitchen foil around the family home and stayed up all night listening for rustling after his daughter’s hamster went missing. The experiment worked, and the hamster was reportedly found.