Former Home Secretary Sajid Javid’s memoir, The Colour of Home, traces his journey from a frightened child in racist 1970s Rochdale to a senior Conservative minister. The book is an intimate family portrait and a social history of race, class and aspiration in late 20th-century Britain.
The opening chapters detail relentless racism: skinheads, taunts of “Run, Paki, run”, graffiti on his father’s shop, and humiliations at school. Javid’s father fought an informal colour bar to become a bus driver, while white neighbours and co‑workers sometimes helped, sometimes stood by.
The memoir highlights Javid’s mother, illiterate but fiercely committed to her sons’ education, and his father, a bus driver whose small clothing businesses repeatedly failed. School is a site of trauma, including a boy trying to “rub the black off” his own arm with sandpaper, and Javid’s shameful rejection of a black classmate to fit in.
Politically, the book refuses to tidy away contradictions. Javid’s father moved from scepticism about Margaret Thatcher to voting for her, even as his life was crushed by property developers and deregulated markets. Javid rose through the Conservatives, but his party exploited narratives of children like him while entrenching policies that brutalised people like his parents.
As home secretary in 2019, Javid revoked Shamima Begum’s British citizenship after she was trafficked to Syria aged 15. He later claimed he disliked the term “hostile environment” but defended the structures that fostered racist practices and contributed to the Windrush scandal. The memoir argues for meritocracy more nuanced than Javid’s political slogans ever were.
