Perhaps Sajid Javid should become a drug dealer – he’d do less damage to Britain

The home secretary is failing spectacularly on knife crime and he has done nothing to rectify the horrors of Windrush, but his punt for the Tory leadership might just work

“The Saj” is in reflective mood, and we’re all a little richer for that. Speaking in east London, Sajid Javid shared some memories from his youth and, man alive, the tale of how he came within an ace of dealing meth doesn’t half sound like Ice Cube and Arabian Prince rapping out an early NWA track in a west country accent. Whether that trade is any less noble than his previous and present careers is a coin flip, though being home secretary he’s slightly compelled to imply that it is.

Anyway, picture the little The Saj at his Bristol comprehensive, ringed by Lord Vaders, in and beyond the playground, tempting him to the dark side. “It’s not so difficult to see how, instead of being in the cabinet,” he recalls, “I could actually have turned out to have a life of crime myself.”

Explain yourself, The Saj. “There were pupils at school that shoplifted, and asked if I wanted to help.” Shoplifters? In an urban school? Whatever shall we do?

And it gets worse. Much worse. “There were the drug addicts who stood near my school gates, and told me that if I joined in, I too could make some easy money.” He plainly means “dealers”. But not being all that at the lingo doesn’t mean he wasn’t perilously immersed in the druggy hellscape.

In the event, Javid made a load of easier money than is earned from loitering on street corners and dodging the feds. He went into the City, where at Deutsche Bank his salary was estimated at £3m a year (whether that includes the bonuses is unclear). The only temptation he couldn’t resist, like Jacob Rees-Mogg and so many wealthy altruists, was to put something back. Public service beckoned, and now here he is among the fancied runners for next PM.

If you didn’t know the man who tweeted about “Asian paedophiles” better, you’d suspect him of crude leadership posturing. “Pick me when the old girl goes, ’cause I had it tough as a kid in the hood,” the messaging might be interpreted as going. “So I’ll find the parts of the electorate those public-school charlies cannot reach. Oh, and by the way, blud, did I mention that I’m not entirely white?”

It might even work. All right, he’s failing spectacularly on knife crime (the nominal subject of his My Narrow Escape From Dealing Smack address) and he has done zero to rectify the horrors inflicted on the Windrush generation. In political executive terms, he appears to be less than useless.

But if banalities like that meant diddly in a Conservative leadership race, would Boris Johnson be favourite after his stint at the Foreign Office? What matters for “The Saj” is that the one thing racists dislike more than other races is being regarded as racists. Give the Tory members, who aren’t wildly keen on those they so often forget not to call “the coloureds”, the chance to prove their colour blindness, if only to themselves, and they might just grab it. A Muslim emblem of Thatcherite up-by-the-bootstrapsism could be irresistible, if he makes it through the MPs to the two candidate play-off. He could become the first bald Anglo-American leader since Eisenhower.

The latter’s rhyming campaign slogan was “I Like Ike!” In deference of that jaunty wide-boy swagger, Javid should consider “I am The Saj … And I’m Givin’ It Large!” for his. A bit wordy for a lapel badge, perhaps, but it would play well in Surbiton.

Now that he’s shared his life of crime near miss, stand by for counter-strikes from his rivals. I have the schedule in front of me. On Friday, Jeremy Hunt is slated to give a speech, supposedly about why the Japanese are desperate to conclude a trade deal with us by as soon as 2059, about his dangerous brush with lawlessness at Charterhouse. Hunt will dwell on a 1981 trip to Goldaming, for a pencil sharpener, when a guy in a doorway offered to buy him a can of lager shandy from the offie for a 20p tip. “I can tell you that I nearly accepted that offer,” the foreign secretary is expected to remark. “I was very thirsty. If I had, I’d be a lifer in Belmarsh today.”

Next Wednesday, Michael Gove will reveal how, at Oxford, he watched a BBC2 documentary about Disraeli at the home of a tutor he reckons – he can’t be 100 per cent, but he’s pretty sure he saw the envelope on a sideboard – had forgotten to renew his TV licence. The week after, Esther McVey will confess how she got back to the car to find a tube of tomato puree under the carrier bags in the Waitrose trolley. “In the end, I decided to go back and pay for it,” she will say. “But I was late for a meeting and it was a desperately tight decision. So let no one say I don’t appreciate how easy it is to stray from the straight and narrow.”

Eventually, Boris will talk about how he agreed to beat up a News of the World hack on a friend’s behalf. But that actually happened, so it doesn’t really count.

It wouldn’t be worth much anyway when you consider how incredibly close The Saj was to being a drug lord. If that doesn’t electrify the Tory members until their blue tresses stand up like hedgehog spikes, nothing from the boy who came within an ace of being the Pablo Escobar of Bristol ever will.