From the outside, Sajid Javid has “led a charmed life”, said Tomiwa Owolade in The Telegraph. After 20 years as a banker, he spent 14 years in politics, rising to become home secretary and, briefly, chancellor. He was often tipped as a future prime minister. Yet we learn little of this trajectory in his memoir, which is focused on his childhood and tells a “tale of Britain in the 1970s and 1980s”, where racism was rife and education was an escape.
I found it “surprisingly moving”, if at times frustrating, said Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in The i Paper. Javid was born to Pakistani immigrant parents in Rochdale – then a “mean, racist town”, where he learnt early on to look at the laces on the Doc Martens boots worn by the local skinheads: black laces denoted nothing to fear; red indicated a National Front supporter; yellow – the worst – meant the wearer “particularly hated Pakistanis”. Javid’s escape was education (he was the first member of his family to go to university) and love. He met his wife Laura, a “blonde beauty”, when he was 18, and married her in defiance of his parents’ wishes. Much of this book is genuinely “absorbing”, but there is a troubling “disconnect” between Javid’s childhood experiences and the “vehemently” anti-immigration policies he later pursued.
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