“People are such Pigs”

[dropcap]P[/dropcap]ig gate. It’s probably the weirdest political scandal of the last decade. The story is, of course, that in his unofficial biography of David Cameron, Lord Ashcroft claims that he knows somebody who knew Dave at a posh club at Oxford. And in this posh club at Oxford, the person that Ashcroft knows reckons he saw Dave put his bits in a pig’s mouth. Which is rather sordid.
Of course, Ashcroft’s source is now claiming that it might not even have been Cameron.
And Ashcroft’s partner in crime/ biography, Isabel Oakeshott, says that they only put it in as ‘one little anecdote’. With only one source, this is the sort of stellar political journalism you’d expect from someone who started the Huhne vs Pryce story.

The Tories have a reputation for being the party of the super-rich and the posh, and if it were true that Dave had covered up for someone who avoided tax, he would have been for the chop(s).

The story blew up for all of a week, and the weirdest thing is, nobody actually seemed to care. It’s clear that people were interested; I mean, someone claimed that David Cameron banged a dead pig’s head.
But I think that the fact is that half of the people didn’t care, and everyone else knew that Ashcroft and Oakeshott were probably telling porkies.
But the pig story covered up one or two even more sordid claims, mainly on Ashcroft’s tax status. Ashcroft claims, controversially, that Dave knew about his non-dom status all along.
This is the news, potentially, that could have threatened to blow up even more than pig-gate.
The Tories have a reputation for being the party of the super-rich and the posh, and if it were true that Dave had covered up for someone who avoided tax, he would have been for the chop(s).
The people would go mad. How could Dave dare protect his friend’s tax status? That would definitely prove that the Tories are not the ‘party of the working people’.

Dave could get away with pig coitus, because ‘that’s what the rich do’

But then, that’s the ironic thing; the pig claim showed the two sides of the coin for the ‘upper’ classes. On the one side, Dave could get away with pig coitus, because ‘that’s what the rich do’.
But on the other, the claim in the autobiography probably came about because it would be easy to manipulate people into believing it, just because Dave is from the up- per class (what even is the ‘upper’ class?).
It highlights how petty, how vindictive the claim is; probably because it came from a petty, vindictive man.
The long and the short of it is that Ashcroft was snubbed by Dave; he wanted a position in power because he was a big Tory donor. And Dave offered him a particularly minor one. Ashcroft got cross.
He claimed that Dave screwed a pig head. End of story. A weird, and jealous story, all because one man, a lord, a ‘respectable’ peer of the realm was angry that he couldn’t buy his way into the government.
I think that should be the real story, to be honest.The real story should be Dave refused to allow an idiotic man buy to his way into a position wherein he could do real damage.
Pig-gate is pathetic; it’ll be remembered as weird and funny, but also an example of failed political polemic. And Ashcroft will be remembered as the man behind it, the man, in the end, who was a complete pig.