The Colour of Home: Sajid Javid’s ‘surprisingly moving’ memoir

Book cover of The Colour of Home — Troubling ‘disconnect’ between Sajid Javid’s childhood experiences and the ‘vehemently’ anti-immigration policies he later pursued (Image credit: Abacus)

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.

“The prose is a bit ‘Jack and Jill’,” said Hanif Kureishi in The Guardian. The book “could have done with a sharp edit”. But what Javid does capture well is the “Dickensian” precariousness of his childhood: bailiffs at the door; the stock in his dad’s corner shop never selling. And the argument it advances about meritocracy is “more nuanced than Javid’s political slogans ever were”. A second volume, documenting his rise through the Tory party, “would be fun to read if he can be as honest about that as he is about his childhood”.