T HE NEW chancellor of the exchequer, who will present the budget on March 11th, is arguably the most globalised member of the House of Commons. His grandparents arrived in Britain from Punjab by way of East Africa. He met his Indian-born wife at Stanford Business School in California. His father-in-law is a co-founder of Infosys, a giant Indian outsourcing firm. He swore his oath as an MP on a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu sacred text.

And yet Mr Sunak is a senior member of a government that was brought to power, in good part, by a backlash against globalisation. The party won the election in December not just by promising to get Brexit done but also by promising to tackle the causes of Brexit: left-behind communities that had seen their mines and steam mills destroyed by cheap competition; hostility not just to the Brussels bureaucracy but also to London elites; and, seldom mentioned out loud but often in the back of people’s minds, a feeling that, as a result of out-of-control immigration, people could no longer recognise their own country.

How does this glittering member of the global elite find himself in the forefront of such a movement? Theresa May liked to argue that “Brexit means Brexit”. But in fact Brexit means completely different things to conservative tribes. Pro-globalisers think that Brexit is a natural extension of globalisation. For them the European Union is a transnational protectionist bloc that discriminates against non-Europeans in its immigration policy and protects its farmers from the global market. Anti-globalisers see the EU as an engine of globalisation that prevents countries from controlling their borders, particularly when it comes to immigration, and hands power to unelected bureaucrats and global freeloaders.

The anti-globalisers drove Brexit. Nigel Farage put it on the agenda by co-founding UKIP and then saved it from betrayal by founding the Brexit Party. He has never shied away from playing the race card (during the referendum he signed off on a poster showing thousands of Syrian refugees crossing the border between Croatia and Slovenia) or praising Donald Trump’s economic nationalism. But the pro-globalists nevertheless succeeded in gaining control of the Brexit movement and retaining control of the Conservative Party. Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s chief strategist, whose eccentric views are probably best described as libertarian Maoist, ran Vote Leave, which waged war against Mr Farage’s various leave-supporting organisations. Boris Johnson came out in favour of leaving the EU on the ground that Britain needed to look outward to the rest of the world. The globalisers’ triumph was sealed by the adoption of the slogan “global Britain”.

At the same time the squabble between the globalisers and the nationalists also created a chance for ambitious young Tories with the right politics and a back-story to leapfrog to power. Brexit cost the Conservative Party a generation of leaders who campaigned against Brexit: not just David Cameron and George Osborne but also younger Cameroons who retired from politics (such as Amber Rudd, a former home secretary) or failed to get a seat (such as Rupert Harrison, a former chief of staff to Mr Osborne). It put a premium on giving cabinet jobs to ethnic minorities, whose presence could refute the charge that Brexit is all about racism.

The Conservative Party has a genius for absorbing contradictions rather than being torn apart by them. Mr Johnson likes to smother problems with his damn-the-details optimism. Mr Sunak believes passionately in globalisation’s ability to solve the problems for which it is blamed: he once specialised in investing in British start-ups and, in 2014, he wrote a pamphlet on ethnic diversity for Policy Exchange, a think-tank, arguing that members of ethnic minorities felt more “British” than the white majority.

Mr Sunak’s first budget is likely to be fairly uncontroversial, providing the economy with a boost and avoiding the ruffling of too many feathers. But there will be tensions in the coming months. The government will have to make difficult choices as it negotiates with both the EU and the United States. People who voted to take back control will be confronted with serial disappointments: global companies and markets are going to continue to operate according to global rules that are outside local control and, as the architecture of a new trade agreement is sketched out, disputes will be settled by unelected bureaucrats, albeit ones in the World Trade Organisation in Geneva rather than in Brussels.

Three problems will force the party to confront this particular contradiction. Agriculture will expose the tension between its pro-globalisation wing and the protectionist sentiments of some of its loyalist supporters. Most farmers want to replace EU subsidies with a home-grown regime of subsidies. But pro-globalisers have rather different ideas. A leaked email written by Tim Leunig, a Treasury adviser, argues that the “food sector” is not critically important to the economy and that Britain might follow the example of Singapore, “which is rich without having its own agricultural sector”. The problem of regulatory alignment will expose the tensions between businesspeople and nationalists: global manufacturers support regulatory alignment with the EU precisely because it makes global supply chains easier to operate, whereas nationalists regard alignment as a threat to sovereignty. Any trade deal with America will have to face protests from both consumers and farmers over chlorinated chicken and GM foods.