First there was the orthopaedic consultant, then the new head teacher at my daughter’s school… and now there’s Rishi Sunak. These people are meant to be older than me. A top consultant and a head teacher I can just about stomach, but the Prime Minister? What does that make me?

“Ancient” is the word that keeps pinging on my phone when I point it out to my girl crew. (No, not “middle-aged ladies’ club”, “girl crew”!) Rishi is a sprightly 42 years old, just a year younger than me.

Somehow even more disturbing is the thought that he would have been in the year below me at school. Let’s not pretend that’s meaningless.

If I make it to 100 I’ll probably still relate to people according to what year they started reception, aged four. I could have been Rishi’s prefect. I could have been the one telling him to tuck his shirt in (although I doubt he ever had it out) or to stand straight in line.

So, God bless our new PM, but what Rishi has unwittingly done is to thrust a whole new generation into the bracket of Proper Grown-ups.

Despite the decades of preparation, this has come as something of a shock to me — because in my head I’m still 26. Does that mean Rishi is only 25 in his? I jolly well hope not, given he now has a country to run.

Being older than the PM prompts the obvious question: what have I been doing with my life? When the person steering the ship is older, life is in order. You have a feeling that you’ll get there one day.

There’s a sense that the highest achievements in life are yet to come. But what if this is it? Have I spent my life dawdling?

Given that the average life expectancy in this country is 83, by our early forties we’re at the halfway mark, something Rishi will no doubt be well aware of too. (I hear he’s good with numbers.)

And there’s nothing like reaching half-time to fire you up for the second act. So, yes, 42 is a little on the fresh-faced side for a prime minister – Rishi is the youngest in modern history, pipping David Cameron and Tony Blair to the post by a year (but somewhat off William Pitt’s record of 24). But perhaps it’s also a golden age — a moment when you are wise enough to understand the world but spirited enough to shape it.

Being born in 1980, he’s also the very first millennial PM, which admittedly makes him sound more like the work-experience boy than the big boss, but it’s not a bad viewpoint from which to understand the world. And I say that as someone who’s watched its progression through the same aged lens (although I’m firmly Gen X, being a 1979 baby).

He’ll remember the Berlin Wall coming down, a bridge between our lifetimes and the Europe of the Holocaust, a memory that to me encapsulates how quickly the world can change from good to evil and back again.

He’ll have watched the World Trade Center crumble just as he took his first steps from student to real life, a timely moment to be reminded that beyond our Western bubble, enemies loom large. And he’ll have spent his entire working life online, but lived an internet-free childhood — making him a digital native but with well-honed real-life social skills.

But as I watched Rishi give his “inauguration” speech in Downing Street, there was something more powerful than age that made me feel connected to him. Like Rishi, and so many of us in the Jewish community, my grandparents were immigrants too.

Whether from Eastern Europe or the Middle East (both in my case) or India, that generation came to this country to make a better life for their children — and their future grandchildren.

Many spent their whole lives feeling like outsiders in this country of quiet convention and unspoken etiquette. But hard work and education for their children was their driving force. Rishi, like so many of us in the Jewish community, is the product of that immigrant mentality.

He may not be a Yiddishe boy but his is a Yiddishe story. And there’s a little bit of naches in this moment for all those grandparents wherever in the world they came from. I wish mine were here to see it.

As Rishi waved on the steps of his new home, the red thread of his traditional Hindu bracelet peeking through the cuff of his suit, I found myself thinking of them. I’d love them to know that in Britain in 2022 you can literally be as proudly British as the Prime Minister and be as openly proud of your religion too.

Naomi Greenaway is Deputy Editor of the Telegraph Magazine