Rishi Sunak is David Cameron Mark II

Mr Sunak spoke to the country at the dawn of the new year with a speech intended to show he was a man on a mission. “The cost of living, too high. Waiting times in the NHS, too long,” he said.

Give those lines to Gordon Brown and he’d deliver them with the fury of a heretic preacher. Thunder claps and earth tremors wouldn’t be out of the question.

Sunak spoke them like a commercial director addressing a conference on software sales.

Partly it was the bland, passionless clichés – “build a better future”; “record sums in the NHS”; “tough but necessary decisions” – and partly the bland, passionless delivery. Every speech with Sunak is delivered with the same anaemic, up-down cadences that bleach out all feeling and make him sound like an advert voiceover.

Where’s the animation, the fervour, the authenticity?

Sunak is a more fluent speaker than Truss (not hard) and a less self-indulgent one than Johnson, but it’s telling that like Johnson, he struggles to convey conviction and sincerity, even over the dire state of the NHS.

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He tried to bring out the personal by describing the NHS as “my family’s life calling”, but such was the lack of fire in his words, you were left wondering how much he even used it.

Laura Kuennsberg pushed him on that point on Sunday, asking him three times if he used a private GP, to no avail.

Yesterday in the House of Commons, he revealed that he is with an NHS GP. He didn’t tell MPs when he registered there, but does say he has used private healthcare in the past.

People want to know this stuff for a good reason. While we’re at it, does he have experience of the state education system? Has he ever relied on public transport to get around each day? Has he ever had to top up his income with benefits? If the answers to all these questions were no, then it would suggest he is somewhat detached from the experience of most people in the country.

That might not matter if he really were the commercial director of a tech company, but it matters quite a lot given that he’s the ultimate accountable officer for the running and funding of public services.

David Cameron and George Osborne (Image: free)

Both these things – doubts about the depth of his convictions and the reaction to his healthcare choices – are really about the same issue: Rishi Sunak’s privilege. Can the wealthiest MP in parliament really appreciate how frightening and precarious life is for millions of people right now?

He has pushed his political career a long way simply by not being Boris Johnson or Liz Truss. He’s even done a reasonable job of making himself seem like a break with the past, in spite of having been Boris Johnson’s chancellor.

But as the memory of his predecessors’ chaotic tenure fades, people are judging Mr Sunak on his own merits and wondering who he is. Is he really a break with the past? I’m afraid not. We may be rid of the populists, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that we have in Mr Sunak David Cameron Mark II.

Cameron – regarded by many when he left office as the worst Prime Minister since the war – was always dogged by the same question: what are you in politics for? People wondered what were the burning injustices that drove the Eton- and Oxford-educated son of a stockbroker into pursuing political office.

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As people tried to discern what made him tick, suspicions grew. Was he doing a spot of prime ministering before moving on to some lucrative post in the City? Was he just doing it, in other words, because he could?

People wonder the same thing about the current Prime Minister. Sunak also went to a prestigious public school and Oxford. He made a fortune in the City and married a very wealthy woman. The Prime Minister and his wife are reportedly worth £730m, making him richer than the king.

Sunak, like Cameron, evinces the same air of untroubled entitlement. Both sought and acquired power without being able to articulate convincingly what motivated them to seek it or how they would tackle unfairness and inequality. And so naturally we are left wondering: can we trust them?

In Cameron we have a cautionary tale. He was good enough at presentation to win support but when tested by events, was found wanting. Some of his beliefs proved to be shallow (dumping key environmental measures for instance) and he took a breathtaking gamble with the country’s best interests on a European referendum designed to settle bickering in the Tory party – a gamble for which we are all still paying the price.

With Sunak too, the worry is that he is emotionally detached from the consequences of his decisions. He was an enthusiastic supporter of Brexit and still refuses to say a word against it in spite of the mountain of evidence that it has hiked prices, caused worker shortages and badly wounded the economy. Perhaps like other hardline Brexiteers, he considers it reasonable for (other) people to suffer for the cause.

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So yes, we’ve had a break from the blatant dishonesty and chaos of the Johnson years, but it feels as if we have been landed with another elitist Prime Minister who may struggle to identify with people’s daily struggles.

That’s why I miss Gordon Brown, imperfect though he was, as the last Prime Minister who was genuinely committed to tackling inequality and injustice. Rishi Sunak’s head-boy grin won’t provide cover for long if he can’t prove to doubting voters that he really cares.