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- [00:00]
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- [00:30]
Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with Sajid Javid, former British politician for the Conservative Party. Javid joined us at the Shaw Theatre in London to discuss his life in politics and the lessons he learned at the heart of government. Drawing on his memoir, the Colour of Home, he also shared the story of his journey from a childhood shaped by poverty and racism to the highest levels of British politics and reflected on Britain's multicultural society and his years serving in Cabinet under three Prime Ministers. Let's join our host, Richard Ashar now with more. A brief content warning for this episode. This discussion includes personal experiences of racism and discrimination and contains strong language, including racist and offensive terms.
- [01:27]
Richard Ashar
Good evening, everyone. Our guest tonight has had an unlikely path to the top of British politics and to the heart of government.
- [01:34]
Mia Sorrenti
Government.
- [01:35]
Richard Ashar
Over the course of his career, he's held a number of the great offices of State, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, Health Secretary, Secretary of State for Business, and served under three different Prime Ministers. Welcome, Sir Sarjid Javid.
- [01:50]
Sajid Javid
Thank you very much.
- [01:51]
Richard Ashar
Now, I'm going to fill everyone in here tonight with a little bit of your background, because politics was actually the second act of your working life. Before entering politics, Sajid Javid built a very successful career in international finance. So two big successes, politics at Cabinet level and making a not so small fortune in finance. But none of this was inevitable. Sajid Javed's father arrived at Heathrow from Pakistan in the early 1960s after his family lost everything during the partition of India. He first settled in Rochdale and then Bristol. Saajid's childhood, as we'll hear, was one marked by poverty, racism and the tension at times caused by trying to live between two cultures. He tells this story in his remarkable new book, the Color of growing up in 1970s Britain. So. So saajid this new book, a memoir, but it stops at the point when you enter politics. Why did you choose to talk about your early life?
- [02:56]
Sajid Javid
Thank you for that introduction. Can I just first say, it's my first time on a stage like this with these lights shining and everything. I cannot tell if there's like 10 people out there, like my friends or something. 10 friends or it was like 100, I don't know.
- [03:11]
Richard Ashar
Give us a round of applause and then we can hear you.
- [03:14]
Sajid Javid
Okay, all right.
- [03:16]
Richard Ashar
I think there's more than 10.
- [03:18]
Sajid Javid
Okay, more than 10. All right, great. So turning to your question. Yeah. Why did I stop before politics? You know, when I decided to leave Parliament, which was a couple of years before I actually left, when I sort of publicly announced that I won't be standing again, I did actually get a. Without sort of soliciting it. I got a couple of approaches from publishers asking about political memoirs and. Not unusual, I guess. And I did think about it for about an hour, and I just couldn't get myself interested in it. The idea of, you know, got home one day, opened my red box and blah, blah, blah. I just thought, I know there's a lot of private conversations I had as a politician, of course, with prime ministers, with fellow cabinet ministers and others, but I didn't feel I wanted to talk about them. I felt like I'd be betraying that confidence, and so I couldn't get interested in it. But in terms of a childhood memoir I had read many years earlier, maybe some of the audience have a book by Alan Johnson. This boy and I knew Alan Johnson a little bit in Parliament. We only overlapped a little bit. I always admired him. He was obviously on the other side, but I always admired him as an individual, and I loved his book and his story. And I just thought after I'd read that book, I thought, you know, when I do leave government and politics, if I write anything, it will be a childhood memoir, and that's why I did it.
- [04:49]
Richard Ashar
But it's interesting. You know, you talk about wanting to keep the confidence of your political years, but this is unflinching. Its description of some of the more difficult moments in your life is really moving and sometimes quite hard to read. What do you think is going to surprise people most about the book?
- [05:07]
Sajid Javid
Well, I think there's probably a few things people know about my background already. Son of a bus driver, as we said, quite often, you know, born in Rochdale, you know, one of five brothers and things like that. But this is the first time I really have talked first about my parents and their journey to the uk. That's the first sort of couple of chapters. And then what it was really like growing up as a child, myself, obviously, my brothers, other friends and family around us. And I just thought, if I'm going to do it, I need to do it properly and just give an honest account of things that were just fun and good things, but also things that were just really challenging and difficult.
- [05:57]
Richard Ashar
Let's talk about your family then. Punjabi immigrants to the uk. Where did they settle and what was life like for them when they first arrived?
- [06:08]
Sajid Javid
So first my father came, and that was in the summer of 1961, and he came from Pakistan, but from the state of Punjab, which most Pakistanis are Punjabis. And he was from a small by that he, as you alluded to at the start, actually he was born in India and during the Partition in the late 40s, his family forcibly moved to Pakistan, but his village was just sort of south of Lahore, very poor family. His mother died soon after she had arrived in Pakistan from India. So he's brought up by a stepmother, very difficult upbringing and he just wanted to get out as soon as he could. And he thought a route to getting out was learning English. Because in the 50s, although Pakistan was independent by then, there were still quite a few, as my dad would explain, sort of British people, employers or representatives of employers coming to Pakistan, to villages and encouraging people to move to the UK for what was typically sort of low skilled or unskilled work. And so my dad thought, look, if I learn English, I can get to the UK and I can earn a bit of money. And then initially he thought, and then come back eventually. I think probably a lot of people like him thought that. But then once he got to the uk, he changed his mind and decided that he was going to settle, went back to Pakistan about a year after being here to marry his sweetheart, which was my mum, and then both of them came back to the uk.
- [07:48]
Richard Ashar
And I imagine that there wasn't much money.
- [07:51]
Sajid Javid
There wasn't any money. And so my dad's first job was actually. So he arrived in Heathrow, not surprising. But a friend of his had told him that you want to keep going north because there's more jobs up north, especially in mills and cotton mills and other types of industrial jobs. And his first stop was Birmingham, and he thought, maybe I'll stay there. But another friend said, keep going north. Interestingly, as I say in the book is the place he stayed in Birmingham is called Rubery, which 50 years later when I became an MP, it was in my constituency. And anyway, he went to Rochdale, it was a mill town, and that's where he got his first job without a contract. Where in those days the mills is Coutholds Mill. They would. The mills would look for day laborers, literally for the day. And a lot of Asian men like my dad would sort of turn up in the morning and wait outside the gates and wait for the foreman to come out and pick one or two of them and just pay them a day rate. My dad realized to get the best chance that he would turn up the earliest. And he used to get there about before dawn, stand there until he. And then the foreman was so taken by his work ethic that he was one of the first Asian men to be offered a job in that mill.
- [09:23]
Richard Ashar
So there was a stable job. When your mum arrived, what was life like for her? Was it quite isolated? I imagine she didn't necessarily have the.
- [09:30]
Sajid Javid
English skills that you didn't speak English at all. When she arrived the uk, and it was. And she had, by then one of my dad's sisters had come to the UK as well and settled in Rochdale. And the two of them, not speaking much English, would try to sort of manage the household and try to cope with not much English. One example I give in the book is that my mom wouldn't even know the words for things like sugar or salt. And if you'd go to the shop, she'd actually literally take some sugar with her or salt and just pinch it and try to show the shopkeeper. So, you know, today she speaks great English. But in those days, yes, it would have been much harder.
- [10:13]
Richard Ashar
One of the memories that you recount, which really struck a chord with me because I definitely did the same thing. You talk about watching the news with your dad as a child, I Did that. Did that ignite your interest in politics?
- [10:25]
Sajid Javid
Oh, absolutely. It was. It was. Without that, I'm not sure if I would have. I think my life would have been very different. So what used to happen was that. So we were a family of seven, so my parents, five boys. And most of our lives we lived above the family shop in a two bedroom flat. So it's quite cramped and things. And we had one TV and the boys, including me, we used to like watching on TV after school the Knight Rider or Star Trek or whatever. And what used to happen though is where my dad would lock up the shop and it'd be late because he'd sort of sort the stock out and things will sort of come up about, say, 7:00pm, something like that. Up to the flat, he'd have his dinner, count the day's takings and wait for the 9 o' clock news, as it was then, the BBC 9 o' clock news. And in those days, like everyone else, you know, obviously there were only three or four main channels and there was no Netflix or anything else. And you watched what was on at the time and you could just switch channels. And that's what my dad did. It didn't matter what was on. He would switch channel, watch the news. All my brothers would bugger off and be really upset. I used to sit there and watch the news with him.
- [11:53]
Richard Ashar
Even as you speak about him, it's clear that there was a lot of love in your relationship. But you also write about the brutal beating he gave you as a child. When you look back on that now, how do you kind of account for it? How do you make sense of it?
- [12:11]
Sajid Javid
Well, first, it wasn't just me. It was as in it was something that my dad did that I think, first of all, growing up as a young child, I almost thought it was normal because I didn't know anything else. And although you're right, I do talk about in the book was I wanted. To be honest, it wasn't. I didn't want it. I don't want it to come across in the book that it was something that happened, sort of.
- [12:41]
Richard Ashar
It was when you'd done something wrong.
- [12:44]
Sajid Javid
It was irregular, but when it happened, it was horrible. And what did I think? I think you were asking. I mean, I hated it. I absolutely hated it.
- [12:56]
Richard Ashar
But it didn't affect your relationship with your dad?
- [12:58]
Sajid Javid
It must have, in a way. But it didn't stop me from loving him. And sadly, he's no longer with us today. But throughout my life, if I think about my dad, I think about someone that I love that worked hard for the family. I mean, he worked incredibly hard every hour, every. He'd work all the time. He wasn't a great businessman, to be honest, but he still worked really hard. But. So when I think of him, I think of a loving father, despite the beatings.
- [13:35]
Richard Ashar
Actually, there's another instant in the book that really stopped me in my tracks. Your dad, I think this is before the shop applies to become a bus driver and is told that the job is for whites only. Tell us about that.
- [13:48]
Sajid Javid
And.
- [13:49]
Richard Ashar
Yes, tell us about that, first of all.
- [13:51]
Sajid Javid
So this is a story I heard from my father growing up.
- [13:54]
Richard Ashar
So you didn't know about it at the time?
- [13:57]
Sajid Javid
No, I did. I was too Young, I was about 4 or 5 at the time. So I remember my dad as a bus driver, then as a bus conductor. I remember that, but not the story he was. So, as I mentioned, his first job was in a mill, but he wanted a more skilled job, you know, more steady income, better pay, and he wanted to work on the buses and he got a job as a conductor. And that's when my sort of memories started him working. And I mean, I still remember him sort of. He would come, leave early in the morning, coming down the stairs, I'd chase after him to say goodbye, and he'd have one of those sort of machines on for a conductor machine from those days. But the job he really wanted on the buses was a bus driver because it was considered more prestigious. You'd get paid more, more of a skill. And the problem was, though, as he told me, was that in those days, in the great. This is Greater Manchester Bus Company, that not the bus company itself, but the trade unions, the main trade unit, it had a policy, I think it was the Transport and General Workers Union, and they had a policy, a trade union policy, that no coloreds could be drivers, as they called it. No coloreds. And there were posters and information about this and they'd have posts around the recruitment office saying, no colours for drivers. And obviously my dad didn't like that. And so I tell a story about when he goes to the recruitment office and he asks for the application form to be a driver, and the lady sitting behind the desk says, you can't have it because can't you read? And she points to a sign that says, no colours. My dad had. His English was good, you know, he could obviously read and write in English and all that. And so he checked this up in the local library and he said, there's no law against this and you can't stop me. She called over a manager and then eventually he gets the form. They actually throw it on the floor and he has to then pick it up, apply, and he does. He keeps pushing and pushing and eventually he gets to be one of the first drivers in that bus company.
- [16:14]
Richard Ashar
I wondered if that.
- [16:15]
Sajid Javid
Of color, first bus drivers of color.
- [16:17]
Richard Ashar
I wondered if that influenced your politics, whether it perhaps gave you a bad impression, set you against the idea of trade unions.
- [16:29]
Sajid Javid
It should have. No, there's plenty of other things that said no. I'm just kidding. It was actually, that was the first. The first time. Now that you asked me, that's probably the first time I ever heard about trade unions, was from that experience. My dad did not like trade unions for that reason, which is odd because a natural. So you would think a natural space for people, especially if they're migrants doing sort of those types of jobs that you would gravitate to unions, you know, for the people, the reason people join them. But he didn't, he didn't like them. And in fact, just going back to when you asked me earlier about watching television and watching the news with my dad, you know, one of the, one of the most like abiding memories I have of a period is during the late 70s has become the leader of the Conservative Party. And before that, as people may know that many people know, in the sort of mid-70s, towards late-70s, there was lots of union activity, lots of strike action, the so called winter of discontent. And I didn't know what it was called but I could see my father would complain about the rubbish hasn't been picked up, the electricity in the shop went off, he couldn't serve the customers and all of that. And despite the union stuff, he had always voted labor up until 1979. And I remember during the 1979 election campaign and he'd watched the news even more then, really interested in the election, the results. He said he would point to Margaret Thatcher when she's on the TV and say this woman is going to sort the country out. And that had an impression on me.
- [18:23]
Richard Ashar
To wind back and talk about the racism. The racism is really quite shocking that you describe in your book. Let's begin at the beginning. I mean you were just five, I think, and experienced really terrible racism. Tell us about what happened.
- [18:37]
Sajid Javid
I think so. I think the incident you're probably referring to is the walk to school.
- [18:44]
Richard Ashar
Yes.
- [18:45]
Sajid Javid
Yeah. So and this would happen, I mean it happened in many forms but the one thing that happened at least once or twice a week is that I used to walk to school in Rochdale, to my primary school with my cousin Rosina. And she was the same age roughly as me. In fact my two older brothers, Khalid and Tarek would come on, would come with us but they'd always run off ahead and cross this busy road that we weren't the younger ones, I was five. We weren't supposed to cross. We'd always want to have to go through a tunnel and we used to be frightened because quite often in the tunnel there were skinheads and skinheads with big Doc Marten boots on and red laces and things. And they didn't like people that didn't look like them.
- [19:35]
Richard Ashar
Indeed.
- [19:35]
Sajid Javid
And they weren't talking about the skinhead you know, in terms of looking like them. And the bit I talk about in the book, I used to. This used to happen often, actually. I talk about one particular incident, but we would. My cousin, I would walk down the tunnel and then they'd watch her start throwing stones and start singing. What? Singing, but songs about Paki bashing and. And I won't try to sing it, but they would talk about Paki bashing and relentlessly and louder and louder throwing stones at us. But it was the only way to school and so we'd have to walk past them and sometimes they might hit us with a stick on our legs or something and luckily nothing worse than that would happen. That was bad enough. And I used to hate the walk to school for that reason.
- [20:25]
Richard Ashar
And it carried on throughout your school years. You got into a fight once at.
- [20:29]
Sajid Javid
School and there were. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there was. There was lots of racism in school and in. Whether in Rochdale, in. In Bristol and. And I saw. And it wasn't just racism. I experience, I used to, you know, you. You would see with some other fellow students. I talk about, for example in the book, I talk about an incident where one of the schools, my primary school in Bristol where one of my friends was a young black boy called Derek. And Derek used to get a lot. I mean, I used to get racial abuse. He used to get a lot worse than me. I used to feel sorry for him all the time. And then one day we're in a class, I don't remember what the class was, and then he puts his hand up to go off to the loo. I then, you know, I go a couple minutes later and I see him round the corner by the loo and he's doing something, rubbing his. Seems to be some action going on and I thought, what's he up to? And I'll go over and he's got glass paper that he's taken from the sort of the design class and he's trying to rub the black off his arm and I look at him and I say, what are you doing, Derek? And he says, I don't want to be black anymore. And he's re. Rubbing and it's bleeding, it's very red. And he's obviously been doing it for a while and it wasn't the first time he had done it and it's the first time and probably well the last time I saw anything like that, but that really impacted me. I'd never seen anything like that. And he said to me, then he takes. Puts his hand in a Pocket takes them out. He goes, do you want some? And I obviously, well, I say, obviously. Well, it probably isn't that obvious. I didn't want it. And I told him that this is like, why are you doing this? And I said something stupid like you can't take black off anyway and things. And he said, you know, but I'm gonna try. And then I felt, even then I look, I used to then look out for him at school all the time, but he used to get so much abuse. But that really, that incident really impacted me that how racism. Poor Derek had hurt him so much that he just didn't want to be black, where actually he should be proud of being black or someone being proud of being brown. You know, there's. It shouldn't have hurt him in that way.
- [23:19]
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- [24:48]
Richard Ashar
We'll come back to that thought a bit later. But poverty also a defining feature of your childhood. Do you think having to deal with very little money, I think you say it's not feast or famine. It was just famine. Do you think when you got to an age where you were choosing your career, that influenced you into picking finance, to actually wanting to have a stable Income and to know that money was never going to be an issue for you again.
- [25:12]
Sajid Javid
Yes.
- [25:15]
Richard Ashar
It'S interesting. I suspect it's an answer that lots of people from immigrant backgrounds might give. You go for what's safe and what gets you away from that sense of insecurity. Does it stay with you in any sense, even now?
- [25:28]
Sajid Javid
Yeah, probably. I mean, even now I've been very fortunate and had good jobs and good opportunities, but I think one's relationship with money begins at a very young age. And I think I couldn't say that it still doesn't impact me. Now.
- [25:50]
Richard Ashar
There's so many great stories in this book, but there's one that I have to get you to talk about, which is when you were arrested, the man who goes on to be Home Secretary. Just tell us about that and how it affected you. How did you come to be arrested?
- [26:06]
Sajid Javid
How did I end up in a police cell? Is that what you're asking me? So we, as I mentioned, we lived, myself and my brothers, we all lived above the shop. My parents worked in the shop, both of them, as we were getting from sort of age 8, 9 onwards, my mother did as well, and they worked six days a week and my dad even on the Sundays at the warehouse and stuff. So they worked all the time, the kids. We were pretty much left alone and especially during the holidays. And then we got into. With my brothers and for me in particular, one of my brothers is Basset or Bas for short, and he's only a year and a half younger than me. And so we did a. We're sort of quite close in age and we did a lot of things together and they weren't always good things. It was always his influence, I want to say.
- [27:01]
Richard Ashar
He went on to be a very senior police officer in Wackadote. That's what makes this story even better.
- [27:06]
Sajid Javid
True. And so. And this incident that you refer to was when we were. He were. I think he was about 9, 9 or 10, and I was 12, and it was around fiddling fruit machines in arcades and amusement arcades. Fruit machines. And what had happened is that we had seen some other lads in an amusement arcade. And the street that we lived on, it was full of amusement arcades and betting shops and places like that. We had seen them fiddling this fruit machine by sticking a wire in the coin slot and clicking the wire into where the coin would fall and then fooling the machine, thinking someone's put money in it and therefore getting these credits. And therefore, obviously you're going to win if you're not putting any money in. And Bassett and I saw that and we thought this was amazing. One of the best things we've ever seen in our lives. And we learned from these kids what they were doing and they told us they had this. We asked them where they got this wire from and they said it's called fishing tackle. I'd never heard of fishing tackle.
- [28:20]
Richard Ashar
Had you ever been fishing?
- [28:21]
Sajid Javid
I never. The only relationship I had with the fish was Captain Bird's eye, like fish. And that was. I didn't know anything about fish, really. And so then the next thing is we have to. Then we think, okay, we have to get hold of this fishing tackle. It's magic. And we thought, okay, how'd you do that? Let's go to a fishing shop. And so we get out the Yellow Pages, there's no Internet in those days. And we find a shop in central Bristol called Veal's Fishing. Veal's Fishing or something. Or Veal's Tackle. Sorry, Veal's Tackle. We go there and you've got to imagine this. It's like these two Asian lads, you know, 9 and 11. And we walk in, the bell rings, we walk in through the door, this middle aged white man comes out behind the counter and he just looks at us thinking, what do these kids want? And we say, he says, can I help you? And we say, can we have some fishing tackle? And he says, what kind of tackle? Like what size? Well, I. Fishing tackle. And then he says, you can tell immediately he's. These boys don't know what they're talking about. Then he said, how much tackle do you want? And we're saying, what do you mean? He goes, well, how long do you want it to be? And I think Bass says something like, you know, five inches, six inch. He goes, so you're not going to catch much fish with that, are you? And then we're like, okay, you know, 10 inches. We have no idea what we're talking about. And I think he's getting fed up with us. And he goes around, gets a bit of tackle, and then he says, where are you fishing? And then we thought, oh God, he's got us now. We have no idea. And before I can say anything, Basset mentions the name of the only body of water that we knew, which is called the River Avon. And he just says, River Avon. Anyway, so I'm digressing for the actual story about how that's not why we got arrested, by the way, but that probably would have been bad enough. So we get hold of this wire. And now we can do this fiddling of fruit machines and we start doing it in our locality. And then one summer we decide that we need to be able to go, we need to go somewhere where there's loads of amusement arcades and we can just make hundreds of pounds. We were just getting totally carried away with this. It was so easy to make money, get money out of these machines. And in fact we were making, I mean those days it sounded like a lot of money to us. You £10,15 a day, but that was a lot of money to us. And I had a Black horse young savers account at Lloyds bank and I used to put all the money into that account.
- [31:03]
Richard Ashar
Don't do this at home kids.
- [31:07]
Sajid Javid
And so we decide we've got to go to a place with loads of amusement arcades. And that place was Western Super Mare. It wasn't too far from Bristol. We catch a bus to Western Super Mare. We walk into the first big amusement arcade we see, we start fiddling the machine and we're taking a lot of money out of it. And then about half an hour into this, the manager of the arcade, he walks over to us, short podgy bloke and he says, boys, you seem to be really good at playing these machines. He goes, you know what? Because I've got one round the back and it's got a 10 pound jackpot in the front of the shop. They all had a three pound jackpot. And we basit and I had a secret language when we didn't want others to understand us, also known as Punjabi. And in Punjabi we say to each other actually it's 10 pound jackpot. This is amazing, we should go. And so we decide we're gonna go and so we go round the back. No sooner than we're in, he shuts the door, slams it, locks it. And he looks at us and he just says, you packy bastards. And he says, you've been ripping me off, you've been stealing from me. And if you weren't little kids, I'll beat the shit out of you. And then we thought, oh, we've made a mistake. And we obviously realized straight away that we'd been fool obviously to do the thing in the first place, but certainly to walk in the of his shop. And then he said he's called the police, police arrive, they take us into the police car and next thing we're in Western Super Mar police station and they put us in a police cell. And about 10 minutes later we've told them the names of our parents and give my dad's phone number and they come back in, one of the officers and says, we've called your dad. He's not very happy and he said, he's not coming to the police station to get you. And so we thought, oh shit, it's not gonna be good when we go back and see dad. Then their social worker comes in a corner, a police appointed lawyer. And by then, in our secret language of Punjabi, we've decided in the cell that we're gonna be honest and tell them everything, otherwise we think it's gonna get much worse. And so then that happens, we go home, we get a big beating. But there is a better side ending to this story in a way, in that about three months, two, three months later, we get called to the police station, Bridewell police station in Bristol. And so Bassett and I go with dad. And by then dad, he's calmed down from all this and he just wants to make sure we don't get charged and it doesn't give us a criminal record of any type. And we go to the police station and this is where we're going to hear if the police are going to charge us or not. So it was a big day. And my dad starts. The police officer asks my dad, do you have anything to say before I tell you what we're going to do? And my dad gives him a short sort of history about, I came from Pakistan, I wanted to build a better place for my children, my family. And these are good boys, Basset and Sajid are good boys and Mr. Police Officer, please give him a chance. My dad starts crying and it's one of the first times I saw my dad cry. I think it was the first time. And then, you know, that really affected me and Bass. And we were watching dad crying and I was thinking, dad, don't cry. And I was looking for a tissue for him and he's saying, please, officer, officer, give them a chance. These boys will make you, make you Mr. Officer proud, make this country proud. He said. And the police officer, you could see he's listening. And then he's handed my dad a few tissues and then he says, okay. And he pulls up, opens his folder and he turns to me first and he says, saajid. He said, do you see what this says next to your name? And I had a look and it said caution. He said, do you know what that means? I said, yes. And then he explained to me, anyway, he said, I'm going to caution you and that means if you don't get in trouble with the law again between now and when you're 18, this caution will disappear from your record. And I was really relieved. I thought, I can manage that. That's great. And then he looks at Basset and I could already see on the paper it said charge.
- [35:47]
Richard Ashar
Because he'd been in trouble with the law once before.
- [35:49]
Sajid Javid
He'd been in trouble with the law six months before that when he. He did some shoplifting in Boots. Stole a pen. Don't know why he ever stole that pen. But anyway, he got cautioned for that. And his said charge, because he'd already been cautioned. And to put it mildly, I think Bass was shitting himself. And then the officer says, it says, charge. He's about to charge him, or that's what we thought was gonna happen. And then he gets up, says, I'll be back. Leaves the room, don't know who he spoke to, comes back in, crosses out charge and writes, caution. And he said, it's your lucky day. To Bass, he says, I've done that because of your dad. He said, look at your dad. Said every sacrifice he's made for you to your brothers in this country, and this is how you repay him now. You make him prouder. We were Both like, yes, Mr. Officer, and we meant it. And looking back now, I am so glad we got caught. If I had not got caught that day, I would not be sitting up here with a book and having had the life that I've had, because I would have carried on and on and on because I thought I could get away with anything like that. And getting caught was. It just brought it. I just realized that obviously I couldn't continue with anything like that. I had to change my life. And if I may, just to finish that story at the end of the book, I refer to this in that. What was a very sweet moment was that from that moment, we were sitting in that police station. If you fast forward 30 years, about 30 years, then. Now picture this. It's the National Police College, where senior police officers, they do a course called the Senior Command. Those that are chosen for the Senior Command course to go on to run police forces, they graduate. Those that have passed, they graduate about 20 a year. And my brother Bas, you mentioned Bass, went on to. He joined the Royal Navy, was in the Navy for 10 years, and then left and became a police officer. Was a police officer for 20 years and eventually became one of the most senior police officers in the country, in the Met. Deputy Assistant Commissioner in the Met. But at that time, he was just passing that command course becoming eligible for senior positions in the police. And the custom in the Home Office is that such a senior position course to pass that the Home Secretary of the day always goes to the college to hand out the certificates to those that are passing that day. And the Home Secretary was me. And so on that day on the stage, as well as the other officers, when Bassett's name was called up, then I was the one handing him the certificate. Those two rascals that were in that police station 30 years previous, my mother was sitting in front of us crying her eyes out with joy and she said to us afterwards, if only your dad was here to see you.
- [39:18]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Ginny Hooker and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings. Become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership and to join us at future live events, you can head over to intelligentsquared.com attend to see our full live events program. You've been listening to Intelligent Squared. Thanks for joining us.
- [39:42]
Sajid Javid
It.