The newly appointed secretary has had a decorated career. In January 2015, Javid was awarded the Politician of the Year award at the British Muslim Awards. In November 2017, Javid won Patchwork Foundation’s Conservative MP of the Year Award.
Sajid Javid was on Monday named as Britain’s new home secretary after Amber Rudd resigned, having “inadvertently misled” lawmakers about deportation targets for illegal immigrants.
Javid was born in Rochdale, Lancashire, and is one of five sons of parents of Pakistani descent. His father was a bus driver. His family moved from Lancashire to Stapleton Road, Bristol.
Prime Minister Theresa May’s Downing Street office announced the appointment in a statement. “The Queen has been pleased to approve the appointment of the Rt Hon Sajid Javid MP as Secretary of State for the Home Department,” May’s office said in a statement.
The newly appointed secretary has had a decorated career. In January 2015, Javid was awarded the Politician of the Year award at the British Muslim Awards. In November 2017, Javid won Patchwork Foundation’s Conservative MP of the Year Award.
Currently, Javid lives with his wife Laura and their four children. He has previously said that his family’s heritage is Muslim, but he does not practise any religion, although he believes that “we should recognise that Christianity is the religion of our country”.
Javid has received religious hate mail in the form of a “Punish a Muslim day” parcel; as of March 2018, he was the fifth British MP to receive such abuse.
Javid was educated from 1981 to 1986 at Downend School, a state comprehensive near Bristol, followed by Filton Technical College from 1986 to 1988, and finally the University of Exeter from 1988 to 1991. At Exeter, he studied Economics and Politics and became a member of the Conservative Party.
At the age of 20, Javid attended his first Conservative Party Conference and campaigned against the Thatcher government’s decision in that year to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), calling it a “fatal mistake”.
Javid joined Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City immediately after university, working mostly in South America. Aged 25, he became the bank’s vice-president. He returned to London in 1997, and later joined Deutsche Bank as a director in 2000. In 2004, he became a managing director at Deutsche Bank and, one year later, global head of Emerging Markets Structuring.
Javid, Britain’s former communities secretary, is the first minority politician to hold one of Britain’s four top government jobs.
At a Conservative Friends of Israel lunch in 2012, The Jewish Chronicle reported Javid as stating that “if he had to leave Britain to live in the Middle East, then he would choose Israel as home. Only there, he said, would his children feel the ‘warm embrace of freedom and liberty'”.
On 9 April 2014, Prime Minister David Cameron appointed Javid to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and Minister for Equalities following the resignation of Maria Miller over her expenses. This made him the first MP to have been elected in 2010 to join the Cabinet, and the first British Pakistani MP to lead a Government Department.
Javid defended media freedom and the right of the press to investigate wrongdoing by politicians and officials in his first appearance as culture secretary on BBC’s Question Time programme. “The public were right to judge her on how she responded, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that,” he said.
