“Nostrashamsie,” a friend tweeted at me when Sajid Javid was appointed home secretary this week. My novel Home Fire, published last year, has among its characters a man called Karamat Lone: Britain’s home secretary and child of working-class Pakistani Muslim migrants, who makes his fortune in the corporate world before becoming a Tory MP.
I came to the character in a slightly roundabout fashion. The novel had Sophocles’s Antigone as its starting point, but was set in a contemporary London with two British Muslim sisters responding very differently to their brother when he becomes an enemy of the state. The state itself, in the play, is represented by the ruler Creon, who is also uncle to Antigone. I knew it would be absurd to try and wrestle the familial connection into the novel, but I thought it might be interesting to have something that binds the sisters to the Creon-figure, whom I hadn’t yet started to imagine, beyond knowing he was a home secretary with rightwing politics. Perhaps he, like them, could be of Pakistani-Muslim heritage, I thought. My first response was to dismiss the idea. A Tory with a Muslim background holding one of the great offices of state? Ridiculous.
If it had been just a few years earlier, I probably would have moved on to another idea. But it was the summer of 2015 and the political landscape of Britain included three children of Pakistani-British bus drivers: Sajid Javid, Sadiq Khan and Sayeeda Warsi, all in their mid-40s, young enough and prominent enough to make you wonder how far any one of them might progress in a few years. The novelist in me couldn’t help but think that a certain kind of narrative logic demanded that if you have three very different people from an unusually similar background occupying the same field, at least one of them must go very far; the feminist in me suspected it wouldn’t be the woman. (The fact that Warsi had resigned from the cabinet over Gaza probably bolstered this belief.) So, you could say that while Karamat Lone is a product of my imagination, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine him if I hadn’t first looked at that trio of politicians and believed that one of them might one day occupy one of the highest political offices in the land. (Though not the highest – my imagination still can’t quite conceive of a Pakistani-British prime minister.)
I had finished the first draft of the novel when Sadiq Khan won the London mayoral election. By the time the novel was published he had been in the job a year, so it wasn’t entirely surprising that people asked me if I’d based my Muslim politician on him. Of the many interviews I did around the book, there was only one in which I was asked the question: “Your home secretary – that’s Sajid Javid, isn’t it?” To which I can only say, as I contemplate the Britain we live in today and think about the Greek-tragedy inspired novel that I wrote: oh God, I hope not.
