The question that arises is whether quite such a toff should lead the Tories' opposition to the government's reforms.

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According to opinion polls, most voters assume that he is a toff.

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And you're not going to attack Cameron for being a toff?

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Yet the idea runs deep, in British life of the past half-century, that a true toff must be hushed and slightly ill at ease with his own toffery.

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He is not a drawling toff.

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The tribalists badly underestimated Mr Cameron, blindly dismissing him as a jejune, upstart toff.

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Coupled with the collapse of the economy and social fixtures, that could make the sight of some toff tooling around Athens in a Rolls Royce even harder to take than before.

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Mr Browner nicely retells, for instance, the cautionary tale of Lady Ottoline Morrell, a well-meaning but slightly dim toff who thought she had found her role in life as hostess to London's literary smart set.

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Settled in his chambers around the corner from Turin's courts of justice, with a stately grandfather clock ticking in the background, Mr Grande Stevens appears every bit the establishment toff.

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When the Tories installed the fearsomely well-bred Mr Cameron, and he then kept George Osborne, another toff, as his shadow chancellor, party and leader bet that voters would no longer hold a penchant for shooting grouse against them.

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