Pigging Out

I guess there's only one thing I can really post about today: 'Pig Gate'.  For those of you still blissfully unaware of what this is about, disgruntled former Tory Grandee Lord Ashcroft's unauthorised biography of David Cameron, serialised in the Daily Mail, claims, amongst other things, that when Cameron was a student, he committed an obscene sexual act with a dead pig's head.  That's right, he allegedly stuck his todger in a dead pig's mouth.  Or, to put it more crudely, he fucked a pig.  Allegedly.  For its part, Number Ten says that it won't dignify these claims with a response, other than to claim that Cameron was never a member of the society for which the pig business was an initiation.  Which, when you think about it, isn't much of a denial - he might have failed the initiation.  Maybe he couldn't get it up for the pig, or something.  It's a fascinating story, true or not, combining bestiality with necrophilia, thereby going at least one better than Jimmy Savile.  Moreover, the fact that it is the Mail running these claims might, at first sight, seem somewhat odd. After all, the paper is rabidly right wing and usually slavishly supports the Tories.  But, in truth, it has always been lukewarm about Cameron feeling, like a significant proportion of the Tory party (including Lord Ashcroft), that he's either too liberal, too pro European or just too much of a political opportunist, bending whichever way the wind of public opinion is blowing in order to cling to power.

Of course, the paranoid amongst us might suspect that some kind of conspiracy is at work here: while the world is focused on Cameron's alleged porcine porkings, his government is still doing all manner of other evil things unnoticed.  After all, he's said that he won't be contesting another election as leader of the party, so now's a perfect time for him to be 'taking one for the team'.  Mind you, that assumes that everyone is focusing on 'Pig Gate' - for a large part of the day the mainstream media have done their best to pretend that the pig allegations didn't exist, (hence my feeling the need to explain them at the start of this post).  As the day went on and it became obvious that social media was abuzz with the story and that this buzz was showing no signs of abating, that the rest of the media were forced to start acknowledging the Ashcroft claims.  Even then they were coy, with the BBC only referring obliquely to the allegations and even The Guardian trying to airily dismiss them as trivial. It's only now, nearly twenty four hours after the story first broke, that the media are actually taking the story more seriously.  Which is in striking contrast to the way in which they'll all happily trumpet any old made up bollocks designed to try and discredit Labour's Jeremy Corbyn.  Still, no matter what dirt they try to dish on Corbyn now, it can never match the Cameron pig sex scandal.  Whether it is true or not, the sad fact for Cameron is that, from now on, for many, many people, he'll just be 'that guy who fucked the pig'.  Inevitably, he will be met with 'oinking' sounds everywhere he goes and people in pig masks will turn up at every walkabout he does.  I have to say that the only thing about 'Pig Gate' which rankles with me is that it represents another case of real life rendering satire redundant.  I'd never have dared make up something like Cameron being given head by a dead pig - it would have been dismissed as being too ludicrous.