Sajid Javid has for the first time revealed the full details of his extraordinary row with Boris Johnson and ex-No 10 adviser Dominic Cummings which saw him ousted as chancellor.
The senior Tory lifted the lid on his bust-up with the then-prime minister in February 2020, when Mr Johnson demanded the chancellor sack all his Treasury advisers to stay in the job.
Knowing Mr Johnson’s top adviser was the one pushing for senior Treasury staff to be sacked, the chancellor told the PM at a showdown meeting: “It’s either me or Cummings.”
The PM chose Mr Cummings. Before storming out, Mr Javid told Mr Johnson: “That guy – he’s not going to be content until he burns the house down. He’s running rings around you.”
The former chancellor shared the full details of the ruckus in the Crisis What Crisis? podcast with the Tory party’s former communications boss Andy Coulson.
Mr Javid said infighting had left the Conservatives in a “very depressing” state. He also revealed the terrible scale of the racism he suffered growing up in the 1970s – which saw him attacked by skinheads and his parents’ shop vandalised.
The former cabinet minister – home secretary under Theresa May before becoming chancellor under Mr Johnson – suggested then-PM was “taking his instructions” from Mr Cummings when demanding he sack six Treasury special advisers in February 2020.
Johnson and then-chancellor Javid in 2019
“I reacted immediately, I said, ‘I can’t do that, I’m not doing that… These are like some of our best people, you just want me to fire them?’,” Mr Javid said.
“And then [Mr Johnson] said, “Saj, they’re only people. Don’t worry about it.”
Bizarrely, Mr Javid was then given 15 minutes to change his mind as Mr Johnson marched out of the room. The former chancellor said No 10 officials came in to tell him: “This is all Cummings. Just do what he’s saying because Cummings will be gone soon anyway.”
But Mr Javid said he “just couldn’t do it” despite being “begged” by Mr Johnson to change his mind, leading to his half-hearted demand for Mr Cummings’ exit and resignation the same day.
The former chancellor later patched things up with Mr Johnson – after the Tory leader had fallen out with Mr Cummings – and re-joined government as health secretary after Matt Hancocks’s exit in the summer of 2021.
He went on to play a key role in the PM’s downfall when he resigned on the same morning as Rishi Sunak. Though Mr Javid, who stood for the Tory leadership, insists his exit was not co-ordinated with the man who would eventually become PM.
Mr Javid with Sunak and Johnson in September 2021
The former banker said Mr Johnson’s government was a “massive” missed opportunity, given the huge majority won in 2019, and blamed the former PM for “listening to the wrong people”.
On the party’s current polling woes and internal squabbles on Rwanda and other major policies, Mr Javid said: “I find the whole situation very depressing really”, before offering a grim warning for the 2024 general election.”
“We’re not helping ourselves with all this infighting, and the one thing I certainly learned during my 13, 14 years in parliament is that the public won’t elect a disunited party,” added the senior MP – who is standing down next year.
Mr Javid also discussed the racism that blighted his upbringing in Bristol in the 1970s and 1980s, revealing that he was regularly abused and attacked by National Front skinheads on his way to school.
“I would have to avoid them because the times that I didn’t avoid them I would get punched in the face, punched in the stomach, called P*** and all sorts of other things,” he said.
His parents’ shop was regularly daubed with racist graffiti. “We would wake up in the morning, go down to the shop and someone would have sprayed ‘P*** bastard’ or something along the windows of the shop.”
“And then my poor mother – my dad would be ranting and raving and be really upset – my mother would be the sort of practical one and actually get out detergent and other things and she would be scrubbing it.”
He added: “I think things have improved a lot in our country since then. It’s by no means sort of perfect when it comes to race relations, but it doesn’t feel like that era anymore.”
But Mr Javid suggested that his background was partly the reason senior people at “tired old” British banks turned him down for jobs at the end of 1980s.
The senior Tory, who went to work for Chase Manhattan Bank, credited Margaret Thatcher with the so-called ‘Big Bang’ shake-up of the City which allowed US companies to play a bigger role.
“For these businesses that you know, it was costly to be racist,” he said. “What really made money was getting the best talent in, regardless of their colour or their background. The American banks were much more meritocratic.”
