Brexit: Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid weigh in with early leadership signals

As Theresa May’s grip as PM slips, Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid have weighed in with their charm offensives, eyeing the top job.

Boris Johnson, left, and Sajid Javid are poised to pounce for power if PM Theresa May is toppled. Pictures: Getty/AFP

Sajid Javid has touted his commitment to social mobility and Boris Johnson has compared his weight loss to the Brexit preparations as contenders to succeed Theresa May prepare their pitches for the top job.

The home secretary and the former foreign secretary have used The Spectator to set out their views on Brexit and their party’s future, a decision which will doubtless be interpreted as preparation for a leadership contest.

Mr Javid, seen in Westminster as the favourite among ministers to succeed Mrs May, told the magazine that the Conservative Party stood, in a word, for opportunity.

He said: “The much bigger picture is social mobility. That’s what I want the party to be seen as: promoting how politicians — or the right politicians — can make a real difference to you as an individual in your life.

“I want Britain to be that kind of opportunity society where the government is your friend, working with you, enabling. Rather than holding you back, intentionally or not.”

He said that in his previous role as communities secretary, he had planned to build more houses but was vetoed by Downing Street.

“I think that is still an area where we can be much more radical and open up more opportunities,” he said.

Mr Javid said that although Leave voters wanted to control immigration, they did not necessarily “want less of it”, adding:

“Personally, I think that is far more important than someone saying, ‘Our immigration policy is about bringing numbers down, and nothing else.’”

He said that “very easy access to foreign workers” had been a “cheaper” option for businesses than “looking at automation”, while immigration had kept wages down because “if you can continue to get as much low-skilled labour as you want, where’s the pressure for you to attract more people from the domestic workforce?”

Mr Javid, 49, did not stand for the leadership in 2016, but formed part of a “joint ticket” with Stephen Crabb under which he would have become chancellor. His stock has risen dramatically in Westminster since last year’s election and since he became home secretary in April, however.

Johnson’s weighting game

In a diary for the magazine Mr Johnson segued from being convinced by a “nice French doctor” that he ought to lose some of his 16-and-a-half-stone weight (105kg) and halt his “delicious late-night binges of chorizo and cheese” to a denunciation of the government’s Brexit position.

Britain’s failure to grapple with rising obesity, he said, was “a moral inertia that exactly corresponds to the political inertia of the British ruling class.”

He added: “We know that we have to make certain changes if we are to leave the EU. We know that we have to get ready — to be lighter on our feet and more agile.”

Taking aim at Michael Gove, the environment secretary, who scotched his chances of becoming leader in 2016, he said: “We are told that one cabinet minister [Mr Gove] decided to back this odious sellout of a deal — the worst of all worlds — when he learnt that there was a small risk that in the event of proceeding on WTO terms (itself a very small risk) there might be a brief period in which it would be difficult to source two ingredients for Mars bars … There may have been times in the last century when the government of Britain has looked more pathetic, but I can’t think what they are.”

He concluded by saying: “My sight is keener, the days seem longer and more full of interest, and I have lost 12lb (one kilogram) in two weeks. If things go on like this, I could be less than 15 stone (95kg) by Christmas — for the first time since university — and I hope at that great global festivity to toast the moment in the next few weeks when the British governing class finally summons the willpower to do the necessary, to ditch this deal, to bin the backstop and to make the change that will launch us on a nimbler, lither and more dynamic future. If I can do it, so can we all.”

— The Times