ONE day, George Osborne hopes, he will wake up to be Britain’s new Chancellor. But there is another inheritance that he dreads, that makes the smooth Shadow Chancellor squirm.

No one knows whether Mr Osborne will be bequeathed No 11, but he will one day inherit his father’s 17thcentury title of Baronet of Ballintaylor. Would his forthcoming title help to win votes from a meritocratic society already wary of the admittedly clichéd posh Tories who stick up only for the rich? Mr Osborne looked almost queasy when asked what he was going to do about it.

“Keep my father alive!” was his first response, but was, we gently suggested, not answering the point. “It is a meaningless thing. It is just there, in my family life,” was his second attempt, making a baronetcy sound like a genetic weakness, which politically, it is. Will he renounce it?

“Yes, well, I don’t want to get too technical about it, but you can’t do that,” he smiled nervously, confessing that he has never researched the history of his title but has read up on how to get rid of it. “You can just not use it. You don’t have to use it.”

The problem for the man they call the other David Cameron is, well, differentiating himself from David Cameron. One is young, wealthy, slick and privately educated; the other, er, young, wealthy, slick . . .

But his careful, tortuous, response to the baronetcy dilemma shows the challenge this presents for Mr Osborne. Despite often being touted as the brighter and more interesting half of the pair leading the Conservative Party, he is also the harder man for the voters to get a handle on. As an Oxford history graduate, he is wary of “what if?” questions. But what if it was he, not Mr Cameron, who had stood for leader? How would we voters tell the difference, and how will he, as a possible future Chancellor, make a difference?

That fate was sealed last summer in not one but several restaurants in and around Notting Hill, where the pair talked long and hard about their respective leadership ambitions. These meals, he is careful to state, bore no resemblance to the leadership pact made between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair at an Islington restaurant more than a decade earlier.

“The difference between David and me was when David and I talked about it, as we did quite a bit. It was clear to me that he knew he wanted to go for it, he was ready for it,” he said. “Every time I thought about the position myself I said, ‘I’m not in remotely the same mental state of mind as he is’. There was no deal, no pact, there was no Granita moment.”

That was last year, when the Tories were no-hopers and Mr Osborne’s modernising “Notting Hill Set” were seen as the no-hopers in the race to lead the no-hopers. Now so much has changed, it would be understandable to feel he missed his political moment. “It was the best decision I took in my political career, to make an early declaration that I wasn’t going to run for the Conservative leadership.”

This is a response so emphatic as to make you wonder, but Mr Osborne, the husband of a novelist and briefly a journalist before spending the rest of his young life in politics, is not very good at conveying his own story. Some of this guardedness is loyalty to Mr Cameron, not just his boss but godfather to one of his two children, and the rest is, well, just a little opaque.

“We don’t think exactly the same. I’m just not prepared to tell you in public where we disagree,” he said, and later: “I think he’s done an absolutely astonishing job. I really would not have predicted a year ago, when we were running his campaign, that things could have gone so well in the way that they have.”

Mr Osborne is controlled. When asked the last time he cried, he finally remembers not crying but his eyes being wet when his daughter was born three years ago. He almost never loses his temper — he admires the “even temperament” of his friend, William Hague, in that regard — but anyway he said that Mr Cameron encourages dissent and this apparently dispels any jealousy.

“Now, of course, he is the front man. You pick up any newspaper any day and there are hundreds of headlines about David Cameron. Every speech at the Labour Party conference had some reference to David Cameron. He is the man who has to sell it and we are his supporting team on that. And so in the end he has got to make the decision. But it doesn’t feel like that in the private meetings, you know. It is much more of a team effort.”

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