His father came from Punjab with £1. The new home secretary’s four siblings now excel in the police, business, finance and property
You have heard of power couples. Now meet the power brothers — the new home secretary, Sajid Javid, and his four siblings share a rags-to-riches life story.
The brothers Javid all started with nothing but supportive parents, a crowded two-bedroom flat and a striking physical resemblance. Each has risen to significant wealth, influence or both in business, politics and the public sector.
One, Basit, is a senior police officer with strong views on the very issues Javid will be overseeing. Another, Tariq, is believed to manage a supermarket chain. A third, Khalid, is a high-flying financial adviser. The youngest, Atif, is a multimillionaire property tycoon who has harshly criticised the policies pursued by his own brother’s government.
Javid’s appointment as the first non-white person — and the first with a Muslim background — to hold one of Britain’s great offices of state is the culmination of a six-decade family journey. It started in a village in Punjab where girls such as his mother, Zubaida, were not allowed to go to school.
His father, Abdul-Ghani Javid, came to Britain with Zubaida in 1961 with only £1 in his pocket. After working as a bus driver in Rochdale, he moved the family to Bristol, opening a clothes shop, Scallywags, on Stapleton Road, once described as the most crime-ridden street in the country. “There was a prostitute outside the front door,” Sajid has said.
“Three brothers were in one bedroom, and myself and a younger brother were with my parents in the other.”
The Sunday Times has established, however, that Sajid skips over some parts of his Bristol back story, including the fact that in May 1992 Scallywags went into liquidation, owing creditors thousands of pounds. One family friend blamed it on the “Tory recession” caused by Margaret Thatcher’s decision to join the European exchange-rate mechanism two years earlier.
It did not stop the eldest Javid brother, Tariq, picking up the retail bug with a supermarket job. The second, Khalid, now 49, chose a financial career, setting up his own Bristol-based financial services firm, Blackstone Financial Solutions, in 2014 after a career in insurance and banking. Two years later he was named one of the UK’s top mortgage advisers by The Sunday Times.
Like his siblings, Sajid, 48, the middle brother, was educated at a state comprehensive, where he got into a fight after being called a “****”.
His first encounter with the financial sector came during a summer placement at Commercial Union in Bristol, where he also met his future wife, Laura. “She sat opposite,” Javid has said in the past. “We shared a stapler. Love over a stapler!
“I was besotted. Every time I went to get the stapler I’d touch a finger, then another — and there was no objection. Eventually I managed to ask her if she would come to the sandwich shop with me. I’ve never looked back.”
The couple have four children, three daughters and a son, who all attend private schools. Javid’s meteoric City career — taking in stints at Chase Manhattan, where he was made a vice-president aged 25, and at Deutsche Bank — have made this affordable.
They own at least four properties, including a £4m home in Fulham, west London, and a house in Bromsgrove in the West Midlands, where Javid became a Tory MP in 2010. His constituency is not far from where Basit, 47, works as a chief superintendent at West Midlands police. After leaving school at 16, “Bas” served six years in the Royal Navy, including tours on HMS Brilliant during the first Gulf War. He was commended for bravery and teamwork.
Joining Avon and Somerset police, he worked his way up the ranks before switching to the West Midlands force in 2007. Basit has been critical about the lack of Asian and Muslim officers nationwide. In a recent interview with an Asian newspaper he pointed out that even in his own force only 9% of officers come from an ethnic-minority background, despite the community it serves being 30% non-white.
“There needs to be a balanced and proportionate representation, and that is something we have never quite achieved in the UK,” he said. Basit’s Twitter posts warn against further police cuts and, in particular, highlight the need for sufficient resources for anti-terrorism work.
After a spell as a corporate lawyer, Sajid’s youngest brother, Atif, moved into something almost as unpopular as politics or investment banking: buy-to-let property ownership. “Making decent money on buy-to-let property in Bristol was like shooting fish in a barrel,” he reminisced in a 2016 blog post. “Anyone could do it.”
He proved the point by amassing an £11m portfolio of more than 50 homes, a letting agency and even a few self-developed blocks of flats. Before he became an MP, Sajid was briefly a director of Atif’s main investment vehicle, SA Capital, and may have helped to finance it. That did not stop Atif having what might be seen as a pop at his brother’s banking career. “The best part about investing in property is that it is bricks and mortar. You can touch it, you can feel it and it isn’t controlled by some City whizz-kid,” he said.
Atif has also been highly critical of the policies pursued by the government and its former housing minister — one Sajid Javid. “George Osborne has decided now is the time to milk the golden cow of the UK’s private property landlords,” he protested in March 2016 after the then chancellor raised stamp duty on buy-to-let homes. He accused Osborne of a “war on Bristol property investment landlords”.
The Tories, he wrote, “were always considered to be a political party that accepted the importance of the rental market . . . [but] some property investors in Bristol have started to question that loyalty.”
Atif was critical of Osborne’s “help to buy” policy, which hands homebuyers subsidised loans. “While that helped the Tories get back into power in 2015, some say this impressive growth in the UK property market has been at the expense of pricing out youngsters wanting to buy their first home,” he says.
He seems to have discreetly put his views across: “I was talking to my brother the other day at a family get-together and the subject of the Bristol property market came up in the conversation,” wrote Atif on his blog.
“My brother said it used to be that if you went out to work and did the right thing, you would expect that relatively quickly . . . you would be buying a house . . . I said that as a leading letting agent in Bristol it now seems that things have changed.”
That brother might not have been Sajid, of course — but policies on residential property did seem to soften once he took over as communities secretary in July 2016. Plans to ban letting agents, such as Atif, from charging fees, and to cap tenant deposits at six weeks’ rent, have been delayed and will not begin until 2019 at the earliest.
Another snippet from Atif’s blog is his opposition to the policy that got Sajid his latest promotion: the “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants, which obliges landlords to check their tenants’ immigration status.
Calling it a “real minefield for buy-to-let landlords” in a “cosmopolitan city”, he would surely have cheered his brother’s decision to disown the phrase in his first outing as home secretary.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sajid-javids-rise-caps-triumph-of-five-brothers-b09z3mf3d
You have heard of power couples. Now meet the power brothers — the new home secretary, Sajid Javid, and his four siblings share a rags-to-riches life story.
The brothers Javid all started with nothing but supportive parents, a crowded two-bedroom flat and a striking physical resemblance. Each has risen to significant wealth, influence or both in business, politics and the public sector.
One, Basit, is a senior police officer with strong views on the very issues Javid will be overseeing. Another, Tariq, is believed to manage a supermarket chain. A third, Khalid, is a high-flying financial adviser. The youngest, Atif, is a multimillionaire property tycoon who has harshly criticised the policies pursued by his own brother’s government.
Javid’s appointment as the first non-white person — and the first with a Muslim background — to hold one of Britain’s great offices of state is the culmination of a six-decade family journey. It started in a village in Punjab where girls such as his mother, Zubaida, were not allowed to go to school.
His father, Abdul-Ghani Javid, came to Britain with Zubaida in 1961 with only £1 in his pocket. After working as a bus driver in Rochdale, he moved the family to Bristol, opening a clothes shop, Scallywags, on Stapleton Road, once described as the most crime-ridden street in the country. “There was a prostitute outside the front door,” Sajid has said.
“Three brothers were in one bedroom, and myself and a younger brother were with my parents in the other.”
The Sunday Times has established, however, that Sajid skips over some parts of his Bristol back story, including the fact that in May 1992 Scallywags went into liquidation, owing creditors thousands of pounds. One family friend blamed it on the “Tory recession” caused by Margaret Thatcher’s decision to join the European exchange-rate mechanism two years earlier.
It did not stop the eldest Javid brother, Tariq, picking up the retail bug with a supermarket job. The second, Khalid, now 49, chose a financial career, setting up his own Bristol-based financial services firm, Blackstone Financial Solutions, in 2014 after a career in insurance and banking. Two years later he was named one of the UK’s top mortgage advisers by The Sunday Times.
Like his siblings, Sajid, 48, the middle brother, was educated at a state comprehensive, where he got into a fight after being called a “****”.
His first encounter with the financial sector came during a summer placement at Commercial Union in Bristol, where he also met his future wife, Laura. “She sat opposite,” Javid has said in the past. “We shared a stapler. Love over a stapler!
“I was besotted. Every time I went to get the stapler I’d touch a finger, then another — and there was no objection. Eventually I managed to ask her if she would come to the sandwich shop with me. I’ve never looked back.”
The couple have four children, three daughters and a son, who all attend private schools. Javid’s meteoric City career — taking in stints at Chase Manhattan, where he was made a vice-president aged 25, and at Deutsche Bank — have made this affordable.
They own at least four properties, including a £4m home in Fulham, west London, and a house in Bromsgrove in the West Midlands, where Javid became a Tory MP in 2010. His constituency is not far from where Basit, 47, works as a chief superintendent at West Midlands police. After leaving school at 16, “Bas” served six years in the Royal Navy, including tours on HMS Brilliant during the first Gulf War. He was commended for bravery and teamwork.
Joining Avon and Somerset police, he worked his way up the ranks before switching to the West Midlands force in 2007. Basit has been critical about the lack of Asian and Muslim officers nationwide. In a recent interview with an Asian newspaper he pointed out that even in his own force only 9% of officers come from an ethnic-minority background, despite the community it serves being 30% non-white.
“There needs to be a balanced and proportionate representation, and that is something we have never quite achieved in the UK,” he said. Basit’s Twitter posts warn against further police cuts and, in particular, highlight the need for sufficient resources for anti-terrorism work.
After a spell as a corporate lawyer, Sajid’s youngest brother, Atif, moved into something almost as unpopular as politics or investment banking: buy-to-let property ownership. “Making decent money on buy-to-let property in Bristol was like shooting fish in a barrel,” he reminisced in a 2016 blog post. “Anyone could do it.”
He proved the point by amassing an £11m portfolio of more than 50 homes, a letting agency and even a few self-developed blocks of flats. Before he became an MP, Sajid was briefly a director of Atif’s main investment vehicle, SA Capital, and may have helped to finance it. That did not stop Atif having what might be seen as a pop at his brother’s banking career. “The best part about investing in property is that it is bricks and mortar. You can touch it, you can feel it and it isn’t controlled by some City whizz-kid,” he said.
Atif has also been highly critical of the policies pursued by the government and its former housing minister — one Sajid Javid. “George Osborne has decided now is the time to milk the golden cow of the UK’s private property landlords,” he protested in March 2016 after the then chancellor raised stamp duty on buy-to-let homes. He accused Osborne of a “war on Bristol property investment landlords”.
The Tories, he wrote, “were always considered to be a political party that accepted the importance of the rental market . . . [but] some property investors in Bristol have started to question that loyalty.”
Atif was critical of Osborne’s “help to buy” policy, which hands homebuyers subsidised loans. “While that helped the Tories get back into power in 2015, some say this impressive growth in the UK property market has been at the expense of pricing out youngsters wanting to buy their first home,” he says.
He seems to have discreetly put his views across: “I was talking to my brother the other day at a family get-together and the subject of the Bristol property market came up in the conversation,” wrote Atif on his blog.
“My brother said it used to be that if you went out to work and did the right thing, you would expect that relatively quickly . . . you would be buying a house . . . I said that as a leading letting agent in Bristol it now seems that things have changed.”
That brother might not have been Sajid, of course — but policies on residential property did seem to soften once he took over as communities secretary in July 2016. Plans to ban letting agents, such as Atif, from charging fees, and to cap tenant deposits at six weeks’ rent, have been delayed and will not begin until 2019 at the earliest.
Another snippet from Atif’s blog is his opposition to the policy that got Sajid his latest promotion: the “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants, which obliges landlords to check their tenants’ immigration status.
Calling it a “real minefield for buy-to-let landlords” in a “cosmopolitan city”, he would surely have cheered his brother’s decision to disown the phrase in his first outing as home secretary.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sajid-javids-rise-caps-triumph-of-five-brothers-b09z3mf3d
