Regarding the pig’s ear of a story currently circulating thanks to Lord Ashcroft’s vendetta against David Cameron, perhaps I could add a codicil. As many readers will know, the allegation is that at a Piers Gaveston event attended by David Cameron while a student at Oxford, our present Prime Minister went through an initiation ritual which involved him putting his private member into a pig’s mouth. I doubt that anybody – not even Labour spin doctors or Lord Ashcroft – seriously believes the story. It stinks of the university-years version of a Chinese whisper, whereby any exaggerated urban legend is attributed to the person who becomes most well known after the event. Lord Ashcroft and his co-author should be ashamed of putting their names to such dung.
I speak as one with some remote experience. The only time I went to a Piers Gaveston event while at Oxford – admittedly a decade after David Cameron – it was one of the dullest nights of my life. Piers Gaveston had of course been the alleged lover of Edward II and the society was meant to have had gay beginnings. But what a falling-off was there. There was nothing gay about the evening (in any sense of the word) and the crowd was completely mixed, made up of men and women from every corner of university life. The evening began with a vast crowd of us waiting and shivering at the ‘secret’ pick-up point until buses arrived to ferry us to the secret venue in the middle of a field. As is usual with such parties the getting ready was the best part of the evening.
I seem to recall that it was very difficult to get a drink (as it usually is in the middle of a field) and that we spent most of the evening doing what students spend most of their time at parties doing, which is standing around in the hope that more attractive people will turn up. In this regard, like every other, the evening was a disappointment. The people were the same people you could see any other night of the week in the student pubs or bars. I recall a huddle of people from the Oxford University Dramatic Society looking as expectant and then bored as everybody else. I don’t remember any drugs, and there was certainly no debauchery. In particular nobody, throughout the entire evening, stuck their penis in the mouth of a dead pig. This I would have recalled.
It is, I suppose, possible that every time I went off in search of a drink everybody else shouted ‘Hurray’ and got out the pig’s head. But then again, I feel news of this would have come back to me over the years. What is more, if this had been known to be what happened, in the years before my gaggle of friends went, I suspect we would have heard about it and decided, on balance, to give the evening a miss. As it was, all I remember is coming away with the impression that the society was sullying Piers Gaveston’s good name by organising such dull parties.
Anyhow, I suppose tales like this will be a terrible disappointment for the Labour tabloids and the vindictive Lord Ashcroft. But there it is. The truth is often duller than fiction, but that doesn’t mean people should make stuff up or relay obvious porkies just because someone didn’t give them a job once.
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