Legend has it that the law was crafted when the toffs of the Jockey Club were mired in gambling debts.

ECONOMIST: Horse-racing

Mr Meacher is wisely presenting his proposed right to roam as an issue not of urban versus rural, but of people versus toffs.

ECONOMIST: Charge of the country brigade

But senior ministers know it has set back their efforts to shake off the charge that they are a party of out-of-touch toffs.

BBC: UK Politics

OFFTOFF, to give the Access Regulator its irresistible nickname, was to be a new outfit that would force universities to accept fewer toffs and more proles.

ECONOMIST: Social engineering

The toffs at the corporation figured that an old boy couldn't be all that bad, even if he played music no one else on the station knew.

ECONOMIST: Obituary: John Peel | The

Even toffs were innocent, little dreaming how a vulgar commercial world would create a new elite to supplant them stocky, energetic men who earned their fortunes and bought their furniture.

ECONOMIST: The silence of the lambs

Mr Mittal's London offices, set high above posh Berkeley Square, are next to the sari-clad hostesses of the Air India office on one side and the English toffs and tarts that frequent Annabel's nightclub on the other.

ECONOMIST: Political donations

They are by no means all toffs.

ECONOMIST: Tomorrow belongs to me