Freddie Mercury and Brian May rehearsed their 1985 Live Aid set on the stage of the Shaw Theatre on Euston Road. Their band, Queen, was at that point controversial, having ignored a UN cultural boycott (and made a pile of money) playing to South Africans in the brutal apartheid regime. The 20-minute set honed on the Shaw’s stage was Queen’s redemption, their pass to a new kind of permanent global fame. Perhaps the Shaw helped a little; it was named after the Irish playwright whose own theatrical triumphs helped to pave over personal enthusiasms – for the death penalty, eugenics, totalitarianism – that might have led people to ask if he was really such a great guy. On 2 February, the former chancellor, home secretary and health secretary, Sajid Javid, took to Shaw’s stage to promote his new book and perhaps, to use it on his own past.
Three years after Live Aid, students at Exeter University’s debating society gathered to discuss the motion that apartheid in South Africa was immoral. Sajid Javid, then studying politics and economics at the university, went along to support the motion. Opposing it – speaking in support of apartheid – was the young Conservative, John Bercow. A quarter of a century later, Javid would watch from the Tory front bench as Bercow, then Speaker of the House of Commons, introduced a series of tributes to Nelson Mandela. As Javid left the Chamber he stopped by the Speaker’s chair: “Mr Speaker,” he said, “you’ve come a long way since your days in Exeter.”
Javid, too, had come a long way, as the son of parents who had themselves come a long way – from rural Pakistan in the early 1960s. They settled first in Rochdale and then Bristol. His mother spoke no English when they arrived, and would take a pinch of sugar to the shops to show what she wanted to buy. His father would switch the TV to the news at 9pm; little Sajid would watch with him. They saw Margaret Thatcher appear: “That woman,” his father said, “is going to sort the country out.”
The Bristolian twang surfaces when he says “River Ay-von”, which he does when talking about his brief career in crime. When Javid was 12, he and his younger brother had seen other boys fiddling the fruit machines in the local arcade with a piece of wire. They obtained their own bit of wire and began to play the machines themselves – perhaps an early indicator that the young Javid was destined for success in financial markets – until they were caught by an arcade owner in Weston-super-Mare. He credits the policeman who cautioned him with setting Javid on the straight and narrow, having told him to make his country proud.
This is a key anecdote in Javid’s bildungspolitik memoir, The Colour of Home, which covers his childhood experiences of a loving but occasionally violent father, the racism he endured at school and his path to politics as a working-class, non-white Conservative. On the one hand, this is a revealing account of the Britain that arose from Thatcherism. On the other, it’s another political origin story – an endless parade of CVs and fathers who were toolmakers and bus drivers – that helps to distract from the very important decisions being made by people in power.
Javid’s dad was a bus conductor. Who gives a shit? My dad was a bus conductor for a bit. You don’t see me banging on about it, until now, and only to make a point. All of the people in the world who have the slightest interest in the time my dad spent issuing bus tickets can easily fit around a single dinner table, and fairly often do. In Javid’s account, however, this becomes his politics. The trade union had a racist policy (defeated by Javid Senior’s persistence) that aimed to prevent “coloureds” from becoming bus drivers. On stage at the Shaw, he laughed as he considered whether this had made him anti-union. The audience chuckled too, because they knew that of course it had. Javid’s revenge would be the 2016 Trade Union Act, the most aggressive crackdown on organised labour for 30 years.
They laughed with him, too, when he reminisced about the little camera in the Department for Health and Social Care that caught Matt Hancock cheating on his wife. “Thanks to that camera,” he chortled, “I suddenly end up as health secretary.” What a caper! Javid, the man from Deutsche Bank, holder of nine different ministerial positions in ten years, was put in charge of the NHS in the middle of a pandemic for the most Johnsonian of reasons: because his idiot colleague couldn’t keep his trousers on. What isn’t funny about that!
I had a question for Sajid Javid, but when the roving microphones went into the audience – despite an arm extended so emphatically I worried it could look like a problematic salute – the chair squinted in my direction and then wafted the microphone across the room. Journalists, like beavers, can smell each other a mile off. Someone else asked what decision he regretted, what he got wrong. He struggled to come up with anything. Perhaps I can help.
Javid, despite a glittering career in finance, was a terrible chancellor. His first priority was to produce a Spending Review that would free up some money before the 2019 election, and this was done so quickly, and with such scant regard for reality, that the review produced Treasury tables in which neither the rows nor the columns added up. One economist described these tables to me as “probably the worst government document I’ve ever seen”, which, if you’ve spent time with government documents, is quite the accolade. It’s like saying “that’s the worst Ryanair flight I’ve ever been on”, or “this is my least favourite haemorrhoid”.
Worse than that, however, was what he didn’t do. In July 2019, Javid received a letter from the country’s top statistician, David Norgrove, on the “urgent” need to get rid of perhaps the UK economy’s most damaging number: the Retail Prices Index, or RPI, an old measure of prices that overstates inflation by about one percentage point. But for Javid it was much easier to do nothing. Inflation and interest rates had been low for ages. What could go wrong?
Here’s what: a pandemic that caused a historic surge in government borrowing (which RPI makes more expensive, because the UK sells index-linked bonds) followed by a historic surge in inflation (which RPI makes worse, by overstating price rises). Javid made the easiest of decisions – not to change a boring number that very few people cared about – and is now free to talk earnestly about how people were mean to him in the 1980s, as if that’s more important. It isn’t. If you are annoyed about the cost of government borrowing, or your student loan, or train fares, or your water bill, or the pay demands and strikes of resident doctors, you should be annoyed at RPI, which exacerbates all of these things, and at Sajid Javid, the last chancellor with a golden opportunity to remove it, and who chose not to bother.
That is the point of the big charity gig, the tell-all memoir with the blurb from Alan Johnson on the cover. That is the point of making politics about politicians, their identities, their anecdotes: the noise of the theatre makes the facts seem boring. Tedious questions about why everything is so expensive can be left obscure, unanswered. The truth can be led away into the softly carpeted corridors of power.
[Further reading: Mike Johnson’s message to Britain: remain pure and we’ll love you]
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This article appears in the 04 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Mandelson affair
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