I think the country would have been equally thrilled had it been Gordon Brown or any of the Ulster Unionists accused — if immediately sceptical instead of immediate acceptance.
But it wasn’t Brown, was it ? Nor a dour old Orange Lodge member. It was Dave.
That was the very first thing that sprang to my mind and I was surprised nobody mentioned it.
You still may be missing the point that squeezing this scandal to the last drop may hurt only in the very short term, at the expense of distraction from bigger, longer-term problems.
I can imagine scenarios where this could be a cleverly-calculated and wholly-planned exercise by the tories themselves.
Ask yourself: does the act of latching onto this scandal and squeezing it to the last drop make anyone more effective in oopposition to the tories?
The second post references Black Mirror, it seems. Anyway, great news!
No, I think half of us have been so busy Liking Black Mirror jokes about it on FB and retweeting them (plus the Peppa Pig, Kermit, Miss Piggy etc ones) that we forgot we hadn’t passed them on here too.
Yesterday was a good day for a certain kind of sick sense of humour on the t’internet 
Yeah, David Cameron could easily be masterminding the whole thing, chuckling with fiendish delight.
Anything to get his name in the paper.
No, but it adds, temporarily, to the gaiety of nations.
And in the long run, never underestimate the power of a perception of the ridiculous, especially if it underlines a perception that the Tories have a grumbling potential for unseating Bumface.
A collection of fine quips from (The pig in) the Poke:
Ah, I missed the name, and I didn’t see the story on Twitter. Carry on.
- PorkerGate
The very ridiculousness of the scandal probably makes it more damaging in the long run - whatever else he achieves, Cameron will always be the pig guy now. But that’s Cameron, not the Tories. When he stands down, over this or in the fullness of time, Osborne (or May or possibly even Boris) will take over and if there hasn’t been a sustained, principled, serious opposition to e.g. the Welfare Bill, anti-terrorism and security policy, NHS and education reform etc. then the various opposition parties will find that the Tories get re-elected on the nod.
There is a bigger, much more newsworthy aspect to this story however, which is its source. Cameron has been made an international laughing stock because a billionaire is affronted that his campaign donations didn’t automatically buy him high office. Ashcroft was quite clear in his mind that leading the Tory party and forking over cash wasn’t just worth honours but actual political office - and something more than a junior Foreign Office ministry. His sense of entitlement, and ludicrous toy-throwing when denied, point to a fundamentally undemocratic perception of how power works in this country. And the fear has to be that Lord Ashcroft is much better placed to form an accurate picture of how power really works than we are.
“Billionaire fails to buy Cabinet seat, tries to bring down Prime Minister” is a newsworthy story and once the sniggering is over (I give myself a week, personally) then it deserves some serious scrutiny.
Yup, on the one hand we had the recently-appointed person who’s looking to be Chief Adviser to the Queen publicly snubbing the National Anthem on a State occasion, and on the other hand we’ve got some muck-raking allegation about something Cameron did once upon a time when not on duty.
Typical of course that the thread title talks about “shagging a pig” when it seems more to have been “put his penis in a dead pig’s mouth as part of a weird initiation ritual”. One of those has connotations the other hasn’t, of course, but why piss about telling the truth all the time?
Meanwhile the latest apologia I’ve seen for Corbyn has him “silently pondering the futility of war”, if you please. I guess it’s better than “Hey, if you want to live in a country where everyone sings the National Anthem, move to North Korea!”.
It was a Rinder hook up.
Cameron was rapacious.
He had a jones for fucking bacon for weeks.
Not exactly. The Mail accusing him of it had a lot more plausibility than if the Mirror had, even though I like the Mirror a lot more; the Mail is a Cameron fan in general so would be much less likely to publish it if it weren’t true. It’s also them serialising a book by someone who had a lot of access to Cameron, it’s not just them writing it in an op-ed column or something.
Also, it’s just not that unlikely. His other club allegedly had an initiation ritual of burning £50 notes in front of homeless people, and I find that both less likely and more horrific than dead pig fellatio, but it seems to be widely accepted as true.
It’s really not much of a leftist thing except that working class people tend to belong to the kind of extremely posh clubs with stupid initiation rituals that Cameron and his ilk do. To make the story stick about a working class politician you’d have to tweak it, make it about a drunken bet or something, and then people would believe it about some politicians.
There have been sex scandals about politicians of all stripes - people love reading about them and laughing, but the politicians aren’t always that damaged by them, depending on the details of the story.
You Great Darsh Face - thread title word limit and also clarification in the initial post. Please don’t be so quick to accuse me of lying.
…I’ve had the dead penis of a pig in my mouth - does that count?..
To me “squeezing the scandal to the last drop” means using this scandal to talk about disastrous Tory policies more generally as well-its much easier to discuss other negative traits/acts of a person if one is already talking of something else negative about said person.
I think all of us here in America should be thanking Britain for making us feel better up our political news. It’s been a hard year and we appreciate being shown that things could be worse.
Preach it, Brother!
Jurassic Pork
Perhaps a Not went missing in the first sentence — unless you are referring to the Freemasons.
Anyway, I’ve read and been told about some pretty weird craft ( non-mason ) initiation rites in working-class trades like printing and plumbing and the various forms of engineering. Rather disapproved of by trades unions, they might have pre-industrial origins connected to folklore from back when peasants fiercely rivalled turnips in IQ. ( Maybe they are not known in America. )
Never though did they involve the sexual use of animals, dead or alive. The previous prudishness of the working-class would have found that disgusting. However, other elites, such as Skull & Bones also seem to have rituals purposed to bind the damned soul forever rather than drunkenly celebrating the end of apprenticeship.
Labour politicians from the 1880s to the 1980s imbibed too much of Methodism to participate in sexual rituals; New Labour politicians were too concerned with image and being thoroughly modern millies to waste time in drunken sex orgies.