Sajid javid

Sajid Javid has this afternoon cancelled a speech he was due to give tomorrow, and brought forward the one-year spending review to early September. It was due to take place later in the autumn. A statement from the Treasury said ‘the forthcoming Spending Round will instead be brought forward in early September and will cover the themes and priorities he was due to outline’. This isn’t a surprise for any of those in government who had been working on the spending review. Secretaries of State have been returning to Whitehall today, ready for meetings with the Treasury this week about their spending envelopes. They hadn’t been aware that the Spending

Someone at No. 10 must have had the shock of their lives over the weekend. The new chancellor Sajid Javid had written in the Observer calling for a vote of no confidence in Boris Johnson before offering his ‘full support’ to a government of national unity to extend Article 50. Perhaps the former Remain campaigner turned Leave backer had been reconverted to his former cause by the infamous doom-mongers at the Treasury? In fact, the offending article – ‘It’s no time to play parliamentary poker. Let the people decide on Brexit’ – had been written by Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, rather than Sajid Javid. Oh dear…

Sajid Javid as Chancellor is the latest of a string of encouraging appointments. He knows finance better than almost anyone else in parliament, let alone Cabinet. When Osborne took the the brief, he would confess to people that he didn’t have a clue about economics. In Sajid Javid, we have someone who was vice-president of Chase Manhattan bank aged 25: not because of any family ties but because of his sheer ability. Javid has the knowledge and nerve for a clear no-deal plan, and was always arguing for one in the Cabinet. This will be a bit of a culture shock to HM Treasury, which has been the HQ of

Sajid Javid has been eliminated from the Tory leadership race. He came bottom of the fourth ballot with 34 votes, four down from what he got yesterday. Michael Gove moved into second place, on 61 votes to Jeremy Hunt’s 59. While Boris Johnson received 14 more votes, giving him 157—and the support of an absolute majority of Tory MPs. The increase in Johnson’s vote suggests that there was tactical voting going on yesterday. It is hard to believe that many, if any, of Stewart’s voters would have switched to him. So, where did those 14 votes come from? I would hazard that they are Brexiteers who voted tactically to eliminate

So far in the Tory leadership contests, the candidates have spent a lot of time bashing the frontrunner Boris Johnson. However, with Johnson a sure thing for the final two, the real contest is currently between the other five leadership contenders, hoping to win second place to get on the members’ ballot. Hearing that battle cry, Sajid Javid used today’s lobby hustings to go on the offensive against his rival Rory Stewart. With Stewart building momentum over the past couple of days, Javid took the opportunity to warn MPs against selecting two Old Etonians to go to the members, while helpfully drawing attention to his own more humble beginnings. Unlike Stewart, who

The first televised Tory leadership debate drew as much attention for who wasn’t there as who was. After Boris Johnson decided to avoid the Channel 4 leadership debate on the grounds that voters had had enough blue-on-blue action (and perhaps also that as the Tory leadership frontrunner he has little to gain and much to lose from such an event), the broadcaster decided to effectively empty-chair him – putting up a lectern where he would have been. It then fell to Johnson’s leadership rivals Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid, Dominic Raab, Rory Stewart and Michael Gove to provide the substance of the 90-minute programme. It kicked off with enough blue-on-blue attacks

Sajid Javid’s leadership launch was delayed by over an hour because Parliament was trying to make up its mind on whether to stop a no-deal Brexit. When he eventually arrived, there was a rather jolly atmosphere in the room, encouraged in part by the fact that his campaign team had thought it wise to offer a free bar. He was also introduced by Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson, whose typically rambunctious style set the tone for Javid’s own speech. Javid is pitching himself as the ‘change candidate’, despite having served in Theresa May’s Cabinet right up to her resignation. His reason for offering change? He might be an ‘insider’ in

Michael Gove’s launch was, easily, the strongest of any candidate yesterday and he deserves the plaudits he’s getting now. Even if you dislike him, his speech is worth listening to (it’s here) and it was made without notes. I’ve heard him talk before about the school in Liverpool he mentioned where only one pupil got decent grades. In his original telling, his point was that the distance between Liverpool and Edinburgh (where his birth mother is from) was about the same as the distance between Aberdeen and Edinburgh – so he could have ended up in either city. But alongside the cocaine use, another disclosure in Owen Bennett’s new book

As the unofficial Tory leadership contest moves up a gear, scores of Cabinet ministers, hoping to burnish their leadership credentials have been giving ‘wide-ranging’ speeches across London as they prepare for Theresa May’s inevitable departure. Home Secretary Sajid Javid became the latest contender to show off his policy platform this afternoon, as he gave a speech at the Centre for Policy Studies, to launch the think tank’s new report on UK business. Unfortunately for Javid, it appears the name of the event and the report didn’t quite match his grand ambitions. After all, the tagline ‘Think Small, a report on small businesses’ doesn’t quite remind you of a grand statesman.

It would take a heart of stone – and occasionally I possess just such an organ – not to feel sympathy for Shamima Begum after she lost a third baby, her son Jarrah, barely three weeks old, in a Syrian refugee camp. But should we feel guilt as well as compassion for leaving the child – all unbeknown to him, a British citizen and possibly Dutch too – to fester in the camp occupied by IS refugees? More precisely, how responsible should the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, feel, having deprived Miss Begum of her British citizenship? The BBC news all day long has linked him to the death: criticism of

Why has Sajid Javid announced that he is revoking the citizenship of Shamima Begum? The 19 year old, who travelled as a teenager to join the Islamic State in Syria, has asked for ‘forgiveness’ from the UK, but last night the Home Secretary responded by saying he would be removing her status as a British citizen. He can do this, he argues, because she has a right to Bangladeshi citizenship, which means the government will not be rendering her stateless. A fair few people have suggested that this is about Javid’s own ambitions in the Conservative party, as this move will likely appeal to the Tory grassroots. It has already

Sajid Javid: Boris Johnson should use ‘measured language’ Boris Johnson has been dominating the headlines today for a variety of reasons. The news that he and his wife Marina Wheeler are to divorce is juxtaposed alongside his comments in the Mail on Sunday that the government’s Brexit stance has ‘wrapped a suicide vest around the British constitution – and handed the detonator to Michel Barnier’. His remarks have prompted outrage in some circles, most notably from his former Foreign Office colleague Sir Alan Duncan. Andrew Marr asked Home Secretary Sajid Javid if this was the right way for Johnson to conduct himself: When asked if he thought @BorisJohnson was islamophobic

Surely there is a bit of humbug in this outrage about the two remaining jihadi Beatles, Kotey and Elsheikh, and Sajid Javid’s difficult but correct decision to send them for trial in America. Suppose the grisly pair had been located a couple of years ago in Raqqa. And let’s suppose there was a Reaper drone overhead, and that British intelligence could help send a missile neatly through their windscreen. Would we provide the details — knowing that they would be killed without a chance for their lawyers to offer pleas in mitigation on account of their tough childhoods in west London? Would the British state, in these circumstances, have connived

When Sajid Javid became Home Secretary, he did so on the basis that he would be able to undo some of the political damage done by the ‘hostile environment policy’. Last night, he rather quietly announced that a key element of this policy would be paused, something Labour’s David Lammy immediately seized upon, hauling Javid’s junior Caroline Nokes to the Commons for an urgent question. Noakes insisted that this pause was ‘temporary’, adding that she would not give consent to the data sharing between government departments and other organisations until she was confident ‘that we will not be impacting on further members of the Windrush generation’. Lammy was largely unhappy

According to weekend reports there are now 20 Tory MPs preparing leadership bids should Theresa May fall. However, one minister tells Coffee House that’s not right – it’s actually more like 40. So, with ambitious politicians plotting their next move, who is the frontrunner? Mr S was curious to note that Sajid Javid – the newly installed Home Secretary – has taken the lead for the first time. Javid has topped ConHome’s leadership poll – this is notable given that since the site revived their Next Tory Leader question after the snap election, it has been topped either by a candidate by the name of ‘other’ or by Jacob Rees-Mogg. id