Will the real Rishi Sunak please stand up?

The prime minister wants to appeal to working-class authoritarians as well as middle-class liberals, writes John Rentoul

Sunak contains multitudes (PA)

Liberal Britain is up in arms. How could Rishi Sunak appoint this dreadful man? As an addendum to Tuesday’s reshuffle, the prime minister made Lee Anderson, the MP who said poor people could make a meal for 30p and who supports the death penalty, deputy chair of the Conservative Party.

Sound the dissonance klaxon. Sunak may have described himself as a Thatcherite, and he may have voted Leave, but his aura is “liberal Remainer”. I annoy Tories and Labour people alike by calling him a Blairite, which he is in some ways but not others. New Labour was never neoliberal, as David Blunkett protested this week when he came to talk to our students at King’s College London, but Sunak could be. He does want tax cuts and a smaller state; it is just that he was driven by events and public opinion to manage the biggest state intervention in the lives of citizens since the war.

Anderson has a different aura. He is one of those working-class people that the young Sunak admitted he didn’t have as friends. He was a Labour councillor and worked for Gloria De Piero, the Labour MP for Ashfield, the constituency which he now represents for the Conservatives.