On Your Marks

Here are two comment pieces on the promotion of Sajid David to the highest rank of Government - a seat at the Cabinet table and opportunity to manage a department of all of his own.

Now I don't know Sajid David, but I wish him well because it's not everyday that the son of a Pakistani bus driver makes it to the top although to be fair Mr David has already enjoyed a highly successful business career before launching himself into politics. 

In different ways, Andrew Rawnsley (Observer) and Dan Hodges (Telegraph) point up the significance of this new addition to the Cabinet who will only have a year in Government to make his mark before the starting pistol is fired for the 2015 general election.

I wonder what things will look like this time next year.  


The stellar rise of Sajid Javid and what it says about Britain today

The life story of the new culture secretary confounds expectations and prejudices on both left and right



By Andrew Rawnsley

New culture secretary Sajid Javid. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

And it was all going so well for Sajid Javid. A rags-to-riches ascent from the meaner streets of Rochdale to the top table of government via a highly lucrative career in banking.

A very safe Tory seat in Bromsgrove. A fortune so large that it ought to render him immune to any temptation to be creative with his expenses. A clever man, a focused man. Married to his teenage sweetheart. A father of four. A man without any obvious enemies in his party; a man liked at Number 10 for the robustness of his performances on TV, particularly his robotic ability to repeat "long-term economic plan" until the ears of his listeners are bleeding with boredom; a man with influential admirers in the media and a powerful patron in George Osborne. A man marked out as going places since he arrived in parliament who attained the higher reaches of government a bit quicker thanks to the untragic downfall of Maria Miller.

His accelerated promotion into the cabinet makes him the first Tory of the 2010 parliamentary intake to be elevated to the top table. It has been a stellar rise.

And then things began to take a wrong turn: people started to pick him out as a future leader of the Conservative party, a designation that as often as not turns out to be a curse on those so tipped.

The fascination with the new culture secretary is entirely understandable. It was from America that we imported the term "back story" and Mr Javid has one that stands out amid the more conventional and predictable life histories of many MPs.

By his account, his father arrived at Heathrow from Pakistan in the early 1960s after his family lost everything during the partition of India. He had just £1 in his pocket because his grandfather had "touchingly but mistakenly" thought that that would be enough to get by in Britain for a month until he found work. He did find work, first in a cotton mill in Rochdale. Then, after many rebuffs, as a bus driver. He worked so many hours at so many different jobs that fellow workers nicknamed him "Mr Night and Day". When the young Sajid was four, his father started running a ladieswear business in a grim part of inner-city Bristol. The family of seven was crammed into the two-bedroom flat above the shop. The lesson he drew from his parents' successful struggle to better themselves and their children was a harsh one. "No one's going to give you anything: you've got to go out there and earn it."

To illustrate the low expectations that prevailed at his comprehensive school, he is fond of recalling how a careers officer once advised him to apply for an apprenticeship as a television repair man.

He took a degree at Exeter and then joined the Wall Street bank Chase Manhattan where he was so good at making money that he was rapidly promoted before being head-hunted by Deutsche Bank, which paid him a reputed £3m a year to run its Asian trading division.

He was a teenage Thatcherite, influenced by and sharing his father's disgust with the Winter of Discontent and increasingly enthralled by the woman whom he calls "the greatest Conservative prime minister ever". A portrait of the lady in blue hangs on his office wall. He is a self-described Thatcherite first and a Conservative second. He sends his children to private schools. He has a taste for Havana cigars. In common with many of Thatcher's children of his Tory generation, he is as dry as dust on economic issues and well to the right on most other subjects.

This makes his a disorientating story for many on the left because it confounds their expectations of how someone from that background ought to think and where they should end up. Rather than acknowledge that there is any cause for celebration in a self-made Asian man with a working-class background reaching the cabinet, Labour MPs have jeered at him for being rich and not being a woman.

His story is also rather discombobulating for those on the reactionary right of his own party because one thing it speaks to is the case for an enlightened immigration policy. Bloke called Abdul turns up at Heathrow from the Punjab with just a quid in his pocket? We can imagine the greeting Mr Javid's father might have received from Nigel Farage and his fellow travellers in the Tory party. Welfare tourist! Benefit scrounger! No, as it happens: hard-working father of future millionaire and Conservative cabinet minister.

In his rapid rise, there is some encouragement about Britain. Social mobility has been gasping for breath, but it is not entirely dead. It may be unusual, but it is not entirely impossible for a bus driver's son to achieve a seat at the cabinet table. That, of course, is one reason why he has attracted the attention and patronage of his party's high command.

David Cameron and George Osborne like to pretend that the "posh boy" jibes do not sting, but both know that they are hurt electorally by the widespread belief that the son of a stockbroker and the son of a baronet run a club for the privileged.

So does the perception that the ghost of Enoch Powell, who made his notorious "Rivers of Blood" speech a year after Mr Javid was born, has still not been entirely exorcised from the Conservative party. He said recently that "the damage that was done" by Powell "is something we still haven't been able to shake off".

Of the many factors that prevented the Tories from securing a parliamentary majority at the last general election, one of the most significant was the party's failure to win over ethnic minority voters. Rerun the last general election with ethnic minority voters supporting the Tories in the same proportion as the white population and Mr Cameron would have had a majority.

Given that ethnic minority votes can swing an increasing number of seats, they could again prove crucial to the outcome at the next election.

Mr Javid has not obviously gone out of his way to trade on his life story, but he would not be the astute politician that he is if he were not conscious of the presentational usefulness to the public school leadership of his party of having a Rochdale-born, comprehensive-educated, bus driver's in the cabinet. It is a story of aspiration and social mobility that both the prime minister and chancellor are keen to promote: the son of a resourceful immigrant, rising above the poverty into which he was born to prosper in the City and become a Conservative not because he was born into the party, but because he chose it from intellectual conviction.

The trouble is that it is all a bit too obvious how keen they are to use Mr Javid as a poster boy. While he clearly has the talent to merit his seat in the cabinet, that his first job there would be as culture secretary must have been as much a surprise to him as to everyone else. It has provoked instant questions about the cultural hinterland of the man now with ministerial responsibility for Britain's creative and sporting life.

He loves Star Trek. His favourite film is the saccharine It's a Wonderful Life. He says the last play he went to see was Warhorse at the National, which is a very fine play, but not exactly a recent one. His only previously expressed interest in any of the issues facing the department was when he spoke as a backbencher in defence of the entrepreneurial spirit of ticket touts. Even his friends say that the culture portfolio is not natural casting for a former banker. It has fomented the suspicion that he was parachuted into the department by a panicking Number 10 desperate to get the media to shut up about the prime minister's Maria Miller debacle by serving it a new narrative about a working-class Asian boy made good.

It would be grossly unjust to Mr Javid to describe him as a "token". He is talented enough to have got where he is whatever his background or colour of skin. When asked about his ethnicity, he recalls being abused as a "Paki" at school, but says it is a non-issue now in a Britain that he regards as "one of the most open, tolerant societies in the world".

But there's surely no doubt that he attracts such attention from his leaders and the media because his story is so exceptional. The modernisation of British politics in general, and the Conservative party in particular, will not be complete until the ethnicity of a cabinet minister becomes one of the least interesting things about their back stories.

The ascent of Sajid Javid shows how far we have come and how far we still have to go.