Sajid Javid and an incendiary Sunday Times headline

Political memoirs usually need all the publicity they can get in order for the publishers to recoup large advances that rarely pay off. But Abacus and former chancellor Sajid Javid may have got rather more than they bargained for from a Sunday Times Magazine interview, promoting his new book The Colour Of Home.

“Why I wouldn’t let people like my parents into the UK now” ran the incendiary headline over the online version of Javid’s chat with Decca Aitkenhead. It provoked outrage on social media and was soon replaced by one saying almost the exact reverse: “Sajid Javid: we were exactly the kind of family a Reform voter would want in the UK”, also used in the print edition.

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Yet the original did not completely misrepresent Javid. When Aitkenhead speaks about his unskilled father and non-English speaking mother, the former cabinet minister said: “The biggest block to good community cohesion is English. We should have set a requirement that if you want to settle in the UK, you should be able to speak fluent English. We should have done that ages ago.”

Photographer Misan Harriman called the headline out on Instagram as racist and said he had been first alerted to it when it was sent to him by “one of the most racist people I’ve ever met who sent it to me with the words – ‘see… he gets it’.” Noting the Sunday Times had now changed the headline – perhaps after pressure from Javid himself – Harriman said: “The damage has already been done. The black and brown faces in high places in this country have become the tools of fascism, neo-colonialism, racism.”

It is especially ironic since Sajid Javid was first to complain when The New European – as this magazine was then titled – printed a clearly satirical cartoon of him taking office as a hardline anti-immigration home secretary in 2018 with the caption “I just want to settle in, get organised, then deport my parents.” At the time, Javid described the cartoon as racist. How times have changed!