The shocking truth about the Piers Gaveston society? It’s incredibly dull

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.