Marie Antoinette to Lord Young: Aristocratic Gaffes Through the Ages

(Nov. 19) -- It comes as little shock that Britain's Lord Young of Graffham lacks the common touch.

For starters, there's the title, of course. And there's also his multimillions in the bank, which he made in the 1960s and 1970s as an entrepreneurial businessman. But a government servant, even one in the House of Lords, should at least be able to fake it or keep his mouth shut.

Instead, Lord Young advised Britain's poor to stop their whining and look at the bright side of the global recession:

For the vast majority of people in the country today, they have never had it so good ever since this recession -- this so-called recession -- started, because anybody, most people with a mortgage who were paying a lot of money each month, suddenly started paying very little each month. That could make three, four, five, six hundred pounds a month difference, free of tax. That is why the retail sales have kept very good all the way through.

The statements were reported in today's Daily Telegraph, and within hours Young had resigned from his position as adviser to Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron.

"The fact that Lord Young is a multimillionaire and former trade minister from the Thatcher era threatened to contaminate Cameron's brand of new Conservatism," reports The Guardian.

Sadly, there's a rich tradition of such gaffes from the gilded classes. Below is a look back at some of the more disturbing among them.

"Let them eat cake."

Perhaps the most famous line of all ("Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" in French), this was allegedly spoken by Queen Marie Antoinette of France upon learning that French peasants had no bread to eat. However, there's no evidence Antoinette ever spoke the line. The phrase comes from Rousseau's "Confessions," in which he attributed the phrase to a great princess but did not name her.

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."

Another queen of sorts, Barbara Bush, the woman behind two American presidents, made this comment about Hurricane Katrina refugees, proving herself to be tone-deaf in the same vein as Marie Antoinette.

"I'm sorry. We're sorry for the massive disruption it's caused their lives. There's no one who wants this over more than I do. I'd like my life back."

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And then there's Tony Hayward, complaining about his rough days at the office following the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It didn't go unnoticed that the 11 men who lost their lives in the rig explosion that set off the spill might have liked their lives back too. Hayward late resigned.

Since she wasn't an office-holder, Barbara Bush got off with a small dose of public embarrassment. Only Antoinette truly suffered -- not for the gaffe she might not have even made but for her exalted position in society. At the height of the French Revolution, she was sent to the guillotine.

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