Re-Educating The Culture Minister

Seeing Sajid Javid appointed to succeed Maria Miller as the UK’s culture secretary may look like a red rag to a bull to the all-party group of MPs investigating the secondary ticket market.

The UK's new culture secretary.

However vigorously the MPs recommend some form of regulatory control of the market, such as 10 percent cap on the markup, they can expect no parliamentary support from the minister who would have the matter under his jurisdiction.

Conservative MP Mike Weatherley, whose co-chairman of the APPG and a longtime critic of touts, has already clashed with Javid on the subject.

Three years ago, when Javid was a backbench MP, he told the House Of Commons that ticket touts are “classic entrepreneurs” who recognising an opportunity in the market.

“I think he is wrong on this and it is my job to re-educate him,” was Weatherley’s response.

Javid, a vice president of Chase Manhattan at the age of 25 and Tory MP for Bromsgrove since May 2010, also accused people trying to limit the touts’ trade of being “chattering middle classes and champagne socialists.”

“They have no interest in helping the common working man earn a decent living by acting as a middleman in the sale of a proper service,” he said.

Concert Promoters’ Association chairman Stuart Littlewood said Javid’s comments were “naïve.”

Javid’s a self-made millionaire, devotee of Margaret Thatche and regarded as one of the Conservatives’ fastest-rising stars.

It wasn’t possible to get comment from the APPG at press time.