Sajid Javid: an erudite answer to the modern Tory identity crisis. Perhaps

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/06/sajid-javid-tory-conservative-culture-muslim-leader

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Here’s a Tory MP with an uplifting, meritocratic backstory that could be a fit for 21st century British leadership. Son of a migrant, Muslim, Pakistani bus driver, born in Rochdale, raised in Bristol, state educated and a successful international banker in his 20s. Step forward Sajid Javid , David Cameron’s third, and baldest, culture secretary.

Along with George Osborne, Boris Johnson, Theresa May and the contender who always gets overlooked (Philip Hammond?), Javid is being touted for his party’s leadership the day Dave jumps, or is pushed, out of No 10 (the house, not the bus). In the 19th century, the Tories were led by an ethnic Jew (Disraeli), in the 20th by a woman (Mrs T), so why not a non-practising Muslim in this one?

But hang on a minute. Being tipped as a possible future leader of one’s party (few tipped Thatcher) is rarely helpful to a politician. It raises the bar of expectation, but also that of jealousy among the colleagues, and makes you target practice for the other side. Rapid overpromotion can hobble a career, giving the impression you are not quite there on merit – as William Hague and Neil Kinnock can confirm.

So I turned up to listen to Javid with some trepidation at at a Westminster press gallery lunch on Thursday. Javid can be uninspiring, even wooden, in public and on TV. His recent session with the backbench culture select committee was a bit of a car crash – John Crace was there – as uppity MPs took their fast-track colleague down a peg or three.

So how was he this time? Better than many feared, but still a work in progress. He arrived with a bit of red meat for the assembled hacks – don’t treat journalists like terrorists by using Ripa laws to access their sources, he said, pledging early changes to the law, and was altogether more relaxed than he was on BBC1’s Question Time last week.

Javid is known to be not very sporty (he doesn’t Tweet about sports events, more interested in culture), so when Bloomberg’s Rob Hutton, the press gallery chairman, likened him to Geoffrey Boycott, he explained: “Boycott is a cricketer, secretary of state.” After the laughter died down, he added: “Cricket is a bat and ball game.”

Javid took it in good part and opened his own remarks by solemnly announcing: “I have today agreed to let my name go forward for the leadership … oops, wrong speech.” That’s a bold, cheeky stroke (not very Boycott, no, not at all), though when pressed on his leadership hopes, he was sensibly opaque. Unlike Boris, who routinely invites speculation about his leadership hopes or even level-headed Theresa May – profiled this week by Gaby Hinsliff – he’s not yet in the big league.

What was striking was that though still weak on details of his enormous brief, here was a politician who knows his own mind. He replies quickly and fairly fluently to the kind of questions which are designed to trip him up or lure him to a headline-making indiscretion. “‘Get stuffed Greece’,” says banker minister,” that sort of thing. When I asked him how we were all going to get out of the Greek crisis he said it is “a dangerous moment” where “compromise on all sides” is needed. Britain is on the sidelines of the eurozone negotiations, but would be affected.

In sharp contrast to his first visit to a Tory conference (as a young Exeter University activist he attended the 1990 event in nearby Bournemouth, to protest at Thatcher’s failure to join ERM, the embryo single currency, and she fell the following month), he repeated that he’d “not shed a tear” if Britain’s EU renegotiations fail and we vote to leave. He adds that he’s optimistic they won’t fail, but we’d manage.

One of my Tory chums says a man with Javid’s background and ability is an asset to his party, but prone to “simplistic certainties”. Yes indeed. As you’d expect from a banker he believes that market mechanisms usually do the best job. “My instinct is to trust markets. When governments get involved they screw it up” he said of the recent free-to-air TV sports controversy where the word “MURDOCH” must have been flashing red in his brain.

He said much the same about ticket touts (“classic entrepreneurs … a healthy secondary market” for people whose plans have changed and want to offload their own property) which also strikes me as a bit disingenuous. Help for would-be actors from unposh backgrounds to get into the business? He favours help to promote working class talent (how could he not?), but not at the expense of pulling down the Etonians.

No sign of the mantle of greatness then, but some growth potential. One Tory MP at the lunch told me that if Cameron loses in May, the party will have to try something completely different. The last time an Etonian actually won a UK election, he points out, was Harold Macmillan in 1959. Upwardly mobile Ted Heath, Thatcher and John Major all won majorities. Point taken.

But my ministerial contact also makes a sobering point. In the current parliament of novices, many disillusioned new MPs are poised to bail out in 2015, people get promoted too far, too fast. The media builds ’em up and knocks ’em down. Few stop to ask if the minister has leadership qualities, can motivate people, let alone run a large Whitehall department. And how do they square with the image the party needs to project to sceptical voters?

All good questions for would-be leaders and their parties to ponder – all parties Ed. Some of us thought better of Javid at the lunch, while remaining underwhelmed. It needs a big leap of imagination to see a Javid-led Tory party, but the crisis of the two-party system, coalition-making options as fluid as they have been for a century, could rewrite a lot of rules.

For what it’s worth in the popular touch department, Javid described his efforts (aged 11) to launch “Javid Radio” from his bedroom in Bristol. He also admitted that when Michael Gove’s mobile phone ringtone broke into a tune during a cabinet meeting last month, he was the only minister able to start singing the words. Whose words? Beyoncé’s. Javid is a fan. Don’t sell his shares yet.