Sajid Javid's first conversations with his top mandarins at the department of culture, media and sport might be a little awkward. Apart from enjoying Star Trek movies, evidence of this former banker's cultural interests is so far limited to a 2010 namecheck for the classic film It's a Wonderful Life and a professed admiration for U2.

When he was given a choice from the government art collection to select a picture for his office wall at the Treasury, he chose a wan print of Margaret Thatcher, shunning Hockneys and Hirsts. What might be tougher to explain is why he was associated with calls for the scrapping of the department he is taking over.

"The DCMS should be abolished," the Free Enterprise group said in a provocative report last year called Weightwatchers for Whitehall. Javid, a sharp-suited, shaven headed 44-year old, was a member of the thrusting group of "new right" MPs that entered parliament in 2010. He stood aside from the Free Enterprise group when he became a minister in 2012 and how glad he must be his radical friends did not get their way.

After 18 months as a Treasury minister under the patronage of George Osborne, the self-made millionaire former banker is poised to use the culture department as a springboard to explore what some believe is leadership potential. This week the Daily Mail described him as "Maggie's Muslim heir" and there is speculation at Westminster that Osborne calculates this self-made, state-educated man could be a useful ally in any post-election leadership contest.

During 20 years in banking, Javid became rich. According to unconfirmed reports, he made up to £3m a year through the years of boom and bust and he now owns a £4m home in Fulham and another worth £2m in Chelsea. He sends his children to private schools

"I readily admit that being seen as an investment banker was not the most useful thing on the campaign trail," he said in his maiden speech to parliament. "But it helped prepare me for a profession not well liked by the general public."

Tory MP Gary Streeter employed him as an adviser when he was 29 and described him as "focused rather than driven" and "naturally ambitious". Hard work and family life make him tick, friends say.

His rise to the board of Deutsche Bank – "very quickly through a talented peer group", recalled Anshu Jain, the bank's co-chief executive – was the subject of intense scrutiny by Labour last year. The European commission fined the bank £600m for collusion in fixing benchmark interest rates. Some of the wrongdoing happened during Javid's time and shadow treasury minister Cathy Jamieson pursued him for an explanation. He replied: "I was not responsible for, nor did I have oversight of, any of the functions of the business that have been highlighted by the commission's decision."

There was another blip over alleged sexism. Equality is in his new brief. Last year Labour attacked his "outrageous" comment in parliament that there were no women on the Bank of England's monetary policy committee because "all appointments are made on merit".

Other contributions to Commons debates have included thoughts on benefit cuts, the duties of immigrants to "integrate with us, respect our culture, traditions and values, and make greater efforts to learn our language", and whether "we should help travellers to preserve their way of life – their travelling way of life – by moving them on".

One recent profile described him as "the first of Thatcher's children" to reach the cabinet. In the days before he was promoted, he lined up with Sir John Major's vision of a "classless" society. Javid wrote about his early life for a pamphlet with a foreword by Major, which spotlighted the working-class backgrounds of more than a dozen Conservative MPs. Javid recounted the story of his late father and growing up as one of five brothers squeezed into a two-bed flat in Bristol.

Abdul Ghani-Javid landed at Heathrow from a Pakistani village in 1961, 13 years after his family lost everything in India's partition. He wanted to earn to educate his brothers back home.

"Disembarking at Heathrow with a £1 note in his pocket, my father made his way up north and found a job in a Rochdale cotton mill," said Javid. "Happy to be employed, he nevertheless strived for more. He set his sights on working on a bus, only to be turned away time and time again."

He was eventually hired and worked so hard he earned the nickname "Mr Night and Day". He set up a women's clothes stall selling garments sewn by his mother, Zubaid, and later opened a shop in Bristol. Javid went to state schools and became the first member of his family to go to university, studying economics and politics at Exeter.

"This is the root of my conservative beliefs," Javid said. "My mother and father had nothing and, like many people in their adopted country, worked their way up. The abiding lesson was clear to me: don't doubt yourself and don't ever stop trying."

At university he met Robert Halfon, a north Londoner who would become MP for Harlow in 2010. They took a grip of the university Conservative Association and turned it from a grouping of "old-style patrician Tories into a real political organisation, fighting the National Union of Students", Halfon recalled. "We were a mirror image of what the socialists were doing."

Javid was sharp. "In tutorials he'd have the answer straight away – but not in an egg-head kind of way," said Halfon. "He would work incredibly hard for exams and would say he wanted to get the really best result."

In 1990 many students were tripping-out to the Happy Mondays and Stone Roses, but Javid went to the Tory conference to protest at the Thatcher government's decision to join the exchange rate mechanism, recalled Tim Montgomerie, the political commentator who has been a friend for 25 years. "He handed out leaflets describing the decision as a fatal mistake."

He met his wife, Laura, during a summer job at a Bristol insurance office – "love over a stapler", he remarked. After university he tried for a job in the City of London but was rejected, reflecting later that his face didn't fit. He flew to New York and joined Chase Manhattan. His time in the US included a spell as an aide to Rudy Giuliani's winning 1993 New York mayoral campaign. Back in London he made his fortune at Deutsche Bank rising to the board of directors with responsibility for trading in Asian markets before leaving in 2009.

This week Javid's mother, who lives in Bristol, told of her pride in his rise. "Life was good when we came here," she said. "Everybody was very nice. My husband he came with just £1. He had to work very hard. My son, I think, gets his hard working from that."