Heir to a family fortune and an Irish baronetcy, he was educated at St Paul's School and Oxford University and spent a charmed early career in the rarefied air of Westminster thinktanks and policy advisers.
We have an Eton-educated prime minister, a fifth cousin of the Queen from a long-established family of bankers and stockbrokers; a chancellor who will inherit a baronetcy; a Charterhouse-educated culture and media secretary (tipped, until recently, as a successor to Cameron) whose father was an admiral and aide to the Duchess of Kent.
Osborne, who freely admits that he has little personal feel for Scotland because the baronetcy he will one day inherit originates from the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, felt reasonably relaxed.
Nor does he need reminding that his back-story makes him vulnerable to gibes about toffs: he is heir to a baronetcy dating back to 1629, as well as to a hefty family fortune.Yet in his attempt to caricature the political message underlying the 2012 budget, Labour's Mr Miliband chose the wrong screen hit.
He leapt at an offer to join the Royal Society of Literature, giving his qualifications as "brains and a baronetcy", though the slimy Lytton Strachey (delighted to repay hospitality with insult) thought that all the Sitwells had feathers where brains should be.
The heroic ancestral portrait of Henry Danvers, Earl of Danby, in Garter robes, by Anthony Van Dyck, complete with a patch to cover a duelling wound to the face, was presented by Joseph Danvers, who went on to be given a baronetcy.
His politics were Republican, and he only accepted his baronetcy when persuaded to do so by the prime minister, William Gladstone.Gladstone's daughter was one of many young women whom he befriended, often when they were still girls.
In 1894 he received a baronetcy.
He received a baronetcy in 1812.
He succeeded to the baronetcy in 1837, and he was raised to the peerage in 1869.
Royce was made a baronet in 1930 (there was no issue of his marriage, and the baronetcy became extinct upon his death).
