During his resignation speech in the House of Commons last week Sajid Javid made much of the obstacles he had overcome in life. "I did not quit when old-school bankers said I did not have the right school ties," he told MPs.
"And I did not quit when people in my community said that I should not marry the love of my life." And it's fair to say the former Health Secretary has not followed a typical path to the upper reaches of the Conservative Party.
The 52-year-old MP was born in Rochdale as one of five sons to Pakistani Muslim immigrant parents. But it wasn't always a happy childhood.
Read more:
In an interview with The Sun in 2019 Javid revealed how he was spat and chased by racist thugs as a young boy in 1970s Rochdale. He said: "They knew the typical school routes and would wait round corners, and then shout at you, ‘P***, P*** bastard’ and spit at you.
"Sometimes they’d throw stones so you suddenly feel a stone hitting you, and you’d try to work out where it has come from. I was very young, and I was frightened. I didn’t like that, I hated it. I would always stick close to my cousins and my brothers.
"My older brother would say, 'You guys run this way and I will try to distract them'."
"It was a very different environment then. As a country in terms of race relations, we have come a long way."
Javid 's father, Abdul, arrived in the country in 1961 with £1 in his pocket and settled in a three-bed terraced house on the outskirts of the town centre. Abdul tried to get work in one of Rochdale's many mills, eventually persuading the foreman to take him on by always being the first to arrive early in the morning.
But his ambition was to become a bus driver. On a visit to Rochdale in 2019 Javid told of the struggles his father faced.
"He wasn’t allowed because the union had a rule that all drivers had to be white," he said." There was an informal colour bar. So he kept trying, and eventually he did become a driver."
Javid said his parents worked seven days a week, with his dad running a market stall at the weekend after his shifts on the buses. When he was seven the family moved to Bristol, as his parents took over a shop, living in a two-bedroom flat above.
Their new home was on Stapleton Road, later described by the Sunday People as 'Britain’s worst street'. That label was later rejected by present day residents after Javid told an audience of youth workers that his upbringing meant that 'instead of being in cabinet, I could have turned out to have a life of crime myself'.
He went to a comprehensive school in Bristol before studying economics and politics at Exeter University, around which time he met his wife Laura. After graduation he set his sights on a career in the City, working in finance.
By the time he was 25, he was a vice-president at Chase Manhattan Bank, later moving to Singapore to work for Deutsche Bank, where he rose to become a managing director before leaving in the summer of 2009 to focus on politics.
Within a year he had been elected as MP for Bromsgrove and quickly rose through the Tory party ranks after being close to ex-Chancellor George Osborne, bagging a number of ministerial and cabinet roles. He was appointed culture secretary, business secretary and communities secretary, before becoming the first person from a Asian background to hold one of the great offices of state when he became home secretary in 2018.
He was briefly chancellor of the exchequer - resigning after clashing with the Prime Minister's aide Dominic Cummings in a row over his special advisers - before becoming health secretary when Matt Hancock resigned after he breached social distancing guidance by kissing a colleague.
After stepping down as Chancellor and returning to the backbenches he topped up his MP's £81,000 salary with an extra £150,000 a year as a global adviser to the US bank JP Morgan.
Tragedy struck the family in 2018 when Javid's brother Tariq, 51, killed himself in Horsham, West Sussex, shortly after checking-in to a hotel. At the time, Javid was serving as home secretary.
Tariq, the manager of a supermarket chain, left two suicide notes to his partner Sylvia - telling her she should 'carry on and enjoy life'. Speaking to the Sunday Times last month Javid told of his family's ongoing struggle to come to terms with their loss.
"Maybe I could have made a difference," he said. "And I guess I will never know the answer to that.
"We were all very close growing up - all five brothers born within seven years of each other - so you think about what we could have done? There were no signs and we learned later that Tariq had had some concerns about his work.
"We learnt afterwards that he had a physical health problem that he hadn't told anyone about... and if we had just known, if he had talked to us, perhaps we could have done something.
"I think in some cultures and I would say this is true of the Pakistani culture - there is a stigma around talking about mental health issues. And we have to get the message out that it doesn't matter what culture we come from - we are all human beings and all of us at some time of our lives can have a mental health challenge and there is nothing wrong with that."
Politically on the right of the Conservative Party, Javid was inspired to take up politics by Margaret Thatcher and reportedly had a portrait of the former PM in his ministerial office. He sees himself as a fiscal conservative and repeatedly warned about the dangers of rising inflation and the size of the national debt before becoming health secretary last year.
He has now thrown his hat in the ring to to run as Conservative leader. According to the Times current bookies favourite Rishi Sunak is sufficiently concerned about a Javid leadership that he's asked the ex health secretary to step aside and support his campaign.
Also read:
