There’s no polite way to put this: The biggest story in the U.K. right now is an allegation that prime minister David Cameron put a “private part of his anatomy” in a dead pig’s mouth during an inititian ritual when he was an Oxford student.
The claim is made in a new book—Call Me Dave: The Unauthorised Biography—written by Michael Ashcroft, a businessman and former Conservative member of the House of Lords, with political journalist Isabel Oakeshott. Cameron is also a member of the Conservative party, and Ashcroft has said he fell out with Cameron after the latter failed to offer him a top job after his triumph in 2010 elections. From a Daily Mail excerpt of Call Me Dave:
Cameron … got involved in the notorious Oxford dining society, the Piers Gaveston, named after the lover of Edward II, which specialises in bizarre rituals and sexual excess.
A distinguished Oxford contemporary claims Cameron once took part in an outrageous initiation ceremony at a Piers Gaveston event, involving a dead pig. His extraordinary suggestion is that the future PM inserted a private part of his anatomy into the animal’s mouth.
The man who made the allegation, Ashcroft and Oakeshott write, is a member of Parliament. They add that “there are a number of accounts of [other] pigs’ heads at debauched parties in Cameron’s day.”
Many observers have noted the thematic similarity between Ashcroft’s allegation and an episode of the popular British sci-fi TV show Black Mirror in which a prime minister is blackmailed into (spoiler alert) having sex with a pig on live television. The show’s creator, Charlie Brooker, says he had no knowledge of any rumors involving Cameron and pigs when he wrote the episode.
Cameron’s office has declined to comment on the allegation that he put a private part of his anatomy into a dead pig’s mouth.
