Liberal guilt about race and ethnicity is an increasingly significant obstacle to good government; and the cowardice shown by our political classes is costing lives. Nowhere is this plainer than in the pathetic evasions around knife crime. Yesterday, we learnt that London had experienced its 90th fatality in the wave of stabbings that have scarred the city this year. Yet neither the BBC nor most major newspapers had the courage to point out that this is a slaughter almost exclusively executed by black or Asian young men against other black or Asian young men. And without question, because we will not admit that this is a racial crime we will not solve it. To those who mouth anti-racist slogans, black lives never matter enough to allow the truth to be told.

Javid won’t be my choice of prime minister. But he has laid down a series of challenges to politics as usual, and not least to his Labour opponents. While they prevaricate and allow anti-Semites to run the Labour Party, Javid puts jihadis on death row. Labour’s minority leaders, faced with a massacre of black teenagers, mumble feebly about police shortages as though the odd extra cop might miraculously have been on the scene in time to prevent any of the three murders that have taken place within 10 minutes of my doorstep this year; Javid responds to the call from minority residents to restore intelligence-led use of stop and search.

Javid is making an inescapable case for the value of ethnic diversity in government – but showing that it only works if the minority leader is authentic and courageous, not just there to parrot party lines. What a shame it is only the Tories who seem ready to encourage true diversity – of thought, experience and opinion, rather than parading a front bench of multi-coloured Corbynite glove puppets.

Trevor Phillips is co-author of “Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multiracial Britain"