359. Sir Sajid Javid

March 25, 2026·56 min·4 clips

Sajid Javid's father almost got thrown off a train as a child during Partition, saved when his grandfather threatened guards with a sword.

The cover opens the door. Dale notices its grainy 1970s feel, and Javid places the photograph in Rochdale, where he is about eight with two cousins. Memory carries the rest. The conversation turns to how clearly he remembers that decade, not just as nostalgia, but through incidents that still seem close. Dale says their upbringings were very different, then catches something familiar in the Britain Javid has written about. The book gives them a way in. Javid talks about wanting those memories to be interesting because the details have stayed so vivid. Then school cuts through. After mentioning starting comprehensive at eleven, he reaches back a couple of years to a lunch and the daily little calculations that came with being treated as different. Food becomes the test. A deputy head, knowing he and his brother did not eat pork, hides a tiny piece of sausage in mashed potato and gives it to them. The boys move fast. Javid warns his brother in Punjabi, even as the teacher calls the language gibberish, and they avoid eating it. It is grim, and a little absurd. The story works because he tells it plainly, with the school cat making the memory funny only at the edges. Dale then asks about the first racist encounter that was not just children being cruel, and Javid goes back to being six. The underpass is still there in his head. Walking to school with his cousin Rosina in Rochdale, he remembers teenage skinheads singing racist songs about violence, trying to make them run, and throwing things. The tone stays conversational, which makes the material hit harder. The episode does not turn childhood into a tidy political lesson. By the end, the memoir has opened out from a book cover and a 1970s photograph into childhood, school, racism, and the strange way small details refuse to leave.

As heard by us

A memoir conversation that turns childhood detail into a sharp portrait of Britain.

Javid discusses The Colour of Home by drawing on his own childhood to frame 1970s Britain, from Rochdale back streets to school lunches, family language, and the moments when difference could not be ignored.

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Listen for a memoir-shaped interview about growing up in 1970s Britain.

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