Interview with Sajid Javid, the bus driver’s son who may end up leading the Tories

Sajid Javid seems the very model of a rising young Tory: student politics, then investment banking, then a junior Treasury minister in his first parliament; well-cut suit trousers, crisp white shirt, pastel-blue tie. But what sets him apart, and so excites some of his colleagues, is his background.

His father arrived in Britain from a Pakistani village in 1961, with £5 to his name. It is from his father that Javid got his politics; specifically, from watching the Nine O’Clock News with him during the winter of discontent. ‘My father was terribly fed up and he made comments that were conservative without him really knowing it: if these people want to get paid more why don’t they work harder, aren’t they getting paid enough already, someone needs to sort them out.’ To his father’s mind, the woman to do this was Margaret Thatcher: he voted Conservative for the first time in 1979. His father’s vote, Javid says, got him ‘interested in Margaret Thatcher a lot’: ‘I was a Thatcherite long before I was a Conservative.’

Javid tells me with audible pride about how his father, who died last year, ‘ended up working during the day as a [bus] conductor and most of the night as a driver. His nickname became ‘Mr Night & Day’ because he’d just work every hour that went his way.’ He was saving money to start his own business. They moved from Rochdale to Bristol.

For her part, Sajid’s mother — who as a girl in rural Pakistan hadn’t been taught to read — used to take Sajid and his brothers to the library for hours at a time on Saturday and tell them that they weren’t leaving so they might as well read books. ‘That’s what got me into reading,’ Javid says, before hastily adding, ‘It probably wasn’t the most positive way to do it.