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Sajid Javid’s memoir traces his journey from being a frightened child in racist 1970s Rochdale to becoming a leading member of a political party that attacks and marginalises people like him. However, it is an intimate, and sometimes moving, family portrait as well as a social history of race, class and aspiration in late 20th‑century Britain.
The opening chapters, with their ubiquitous skinheads and “Run, Paki, run” taunts, contain the book’s most arresting scenes. Racism is continuous and targeted: from graffiti on his father’s shop windows to the everyday humiliations at school, and on the buses where his father had bravely fought an informal colour bar to become a bus driver.
Javid doesn’t shy away from showing the cruelty of 1970s and 80s Britain for brown and black kids. White neighbours and co‑workers help the family inhabit the same space as racists, and the book makes it clear that the system is hostile even when individuals can be kind.
The Colour of Home is an affecting study of Javid’s parents, particularly his indefatigable mother. Her illiteracy sits in counterpoint to her fierce commitment to her sons’ education: spotless uniforms, regimented homework and trips to Rochdale Library. Javid’s father is shown as a man of energy but limited luck: a bus driver who repeatedly launches small clothing businesses that almost always fail.
School is a site of trauma. Javid does not airbrush the brutality of playground racism – from the boy trying to “rub the black off” his own arm with sandpaper, to Javid’s shame‑soaked rejection of a black classmate in order to fit in.
Alongside these scenes is the story of intellectual ignition: the tutor who continues to teach him for free, the pink pages of the Financial Times abandoned on a bus, the sense that reading could be a reliable means of escape.
Javid is not a natural writer; the prose is a bit “Jack and Jill”, and it could have done with a sharp edit. It is at its best when it occupies a Dickensian domestic precariousness, the presence of bailiffs, the stock that never sells, the children in trouble. These short, vivid chapters – “Dettol and determination”, “Britain’s most dangerous street” – carry a clear narrative. The memoir’s argument about meritocracy is more nuanced than Javid’s political slogans ever were.
Politically, the memoir compels because it refuses to tidy away contradiction. Javid’s father moves from scepticism about Margaret Thatcher to voting for her, even as his own life is crushed between property developers, debt and deregulated markets. Javid is clearly inspired by his father to rise through the Conservatives, but this sits disturbingly next to the book’s record of racism.
In fact, reading his story in the context of the past decade of Tory rule illustrates how his party exploited the narratives of children like him while entrenching policies that brutalised people who look like his parents. For instance, when he was home secretary in 2019, Javid shamefully revoked Shamima Begum’s British citizenship shortly after she was discovered in a Syrian refugee camp. Begum had been trafficked to Syria as a 15-year-old in 2015.
Similarly, his successor Priti Patel’s posture as a child of immigrants “taking back control” functioned as political cover for policies that coerced people into destitution. The “hostile environment” approach to immigration enforcement, initiated by Theresa May, but a persistent feature of Home Office culture after her departure, fostered racist practices and contributed directly to the Windrush scandal, in which black Britons were detained and threatened with removal from a country they had the full legal right to call home. Javid later claimed he didn’t like the term “hostile environment”, but nevertheless defended and maintained the structures that perpetuated it.
Suella Braverman’s stint as home secretary took this fusion of identity politics and punitive policy even further, marrying the image of a British Asian woman in one of the great offices of state to apocalyptic language about “invasions” of small‑boat arrivals. Her speeches repeatedly framed a “law‑abiding patriotic majority” against desperate people crossing the Channel. In both cases, the presence of non‑white women at the top of the Home Office did not soften the edge of Conservative immigration policy; it helped insulate a hardening border regime from charges of racism while it continued to inflict racialised harm. And while Javid might not have been a member of the government by then, he remained a member of the party for which these were official positions.
Racist rhetoric and policy have now become defining features of mainstream British politics. Recent reporting about Nigel Farage’s time at Dulwich College underlines how little distance there is between the corridors of elite education, racist language and political success. Taken together with The Colour of Home’s scenes of playground racism, these testimonies show continuity rather than rupture: the same casual dehumanisation of Jews, black people and Asians.
In this context, its portrait of a boy learning to survive and outthink that environment – and his insistence that education, solidarity and institutional self‑scrutiny are the only real antidotes – feels less like a nostalgic political origin story and more like an urgent warning about the Britain that comes next. Javid, cheerfully now in the “Big House”, can at times sound like an Uncle Tom: his narrative minimises structural barriers and suggests minorities simply need to work harder in order to succeed.
His decision to concentrate on his early years and write little about his rise through the Tory party represents a serious omission. Surely he has much to tell about the inner workings of the now imploded Conservatives. But perhaps he’s saving that for another volume. It would be fun to read if he can be as honest about that as he is about his childhood.
