Prospect Portrait
ILLUSTRATION BY TIM MCDONAGH
When Sajid Javid was first elected to the Commons in 2010, his father proudly told his friends at the mosque on Friday night that his son had become an MP. They congratulated him enthusiastically—but “they all assumed I had become a Labour member of Parliament,” the home secretary says. There were, in his view, two words that explained this assumption: “Enoch Powell.” Half a century on, the “rivers of blood” speech still trickles through perceptions of the Conservative Party in black and Asian communities. “If you look at the numbers and the percentage share of votes that we get from ethnic minority voters,” he says, “it’s nowhere near good enough.”