9 questions about David Cameron’s #PigGate you were too embarrassed to ask

There are few things that the British tabloids love more than an allegation of bizarre personal behavior made against a British politician, and on Sunday the Daily Mail got its holy grail. According to a front-page story, while British Prime Minister David Cameron was a student at Oxford University in the late 1980s, he “inserted a private part of his anatomy” into the mouth of a dead pig.

The source of the claim is sketchy at best, and the tabloid that printed it does not have the best of reputations. But it has nonetheless gone viral as #piggate or, more ironically, #baeofpigs.

But don’t dismiss this as just a silly tabloid story that got a jokey hashtag. It is those things, but this has also gotten to some sensitive issues of class and elitism, which is part of why it’s received wall-to-wall coverage in the UK.

Piggate is the jokey hashtag that people are using on social media to reference the Daily Mail allegation that Cameron put his penis into the mouth of a dead pig while he was a student at Oxford University.

The Daily Mail story is an excerpt from Call Me Dave, an unauthorized biography of Cameron by British businessman and politician Michael Ashcroft.

According to the story, Cameron was a member of a male-only, quasi-secret society at Oxford known as the Piers Gaveston Society.

As part of either a formal initiation ritual or a moment of drunken buffoonery (that line, after all, is blurry) with the society, Cameron once put his penis into the mouth of a dead pig while the pig head was in another student’s lap.

There is healthy room for skepticism here, and not just because the source is the Daily Mail, a tabloid not exactly known for its rigorous standards.

The source for this story, according to the authors, is an anonymous man who also graduated from Oxford and has since become a member of parliament. The source does not claim to have seen the incident or even have known Cameron, but rather says he saw a photo of the moment.

It’s also unclear from the way the Daily Mail story is written the circumstances in which the source made this claim. The author says he once referenced it during a “business dinner,” then later “repeated the allegation.” In other words, we don’t know whether this anonymous source understood he was speaking to reporters, or if he was riffing at a boozy dinner with colleagues, and so it’s hard to know how much weight to give his second- or third-hand description of a photo.

There are a few reasons this story has become a social media sensation despite the thin sourcing.

Obviously, it’s shocking and bizarre enough to demand attention. It also bears uncanny resemblance to an episode of TV show The Black Mirror.

But the story also speaks to deeper issues of class, education, and politics in the UK — which may help explain why, true or not, it’s so resonated. More on this below.

The Black Mirror is a British TV thriller set in the near future about technology turning the world into a dystopia.

A 2011 episode from the series features the British Prime Minister having sex with a live pig on TV, although this is to fulfill a ransom demand from a group who has taken a princess hostage, rather than an act of youthful hazing.

Series creator Charlie Brooker had some fun with this on Twitter, clarifying that it was just a coincidence:

The Piers Gaveston Society, also known as Piers Gav, is an all-male dining club and mostly secret society at Oxford University that is limited to 12 undergraduate members. It’s named for the suspected male lover of 14th-century English King Edward II, and was founded at Oxford in 1977.

The Piers Gaveston Society is known for combining debauchery with a sort of decadent campiness. The Guardian has compiled anecdotes from a few people who were members or attended club events, and what they seem to portray is not anything as extreme as pagan rituals or orgies, but rather as “wild parties,” “fancy dress rave,” and a “burlesque-type” dance party in drag.

One of the Guardian’s sources described a Piers Gav party like this: “The whole thing really seemed like not-terribly-debauched public schoolboys’ idea of debauchery.” (Recall that, in the UK, “public school” refers to what Americans call private school.)

The pig’s head story is extreme, but not totally atypical.

Cameron, for example, was publicly a member of another Oxford University club known as the Bullingdon Club, along with Boris Johnson, who later became the mayor of London.

The most famous stories about the Bullingdon club typically involve that special brand of rich kid debauchery, for example when some members tried to sneak a cow through a freight elevator and ended up killing the cow and causing tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage.

Bullingdon members are required to purchase and wear uniforms of tailcoats and waistcoats that look ridiculous and are spectacularly expensive. That attitude should tell you something: the clubs are both silly and chummy — nothing brings a group together like a shared experience that is slightly humiliating — but also steeped in class culture.

The club was satirized by Evelyn Waugh in a 1928 novel about decadence and hedonism among young British elites. Waugh used the title “Decline and Fall,” a reference to the classic history “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

That quote above, about “public schoolboys’ idea of debauchery,” is really crucial for understanding the fascination with Piers Galverston and these sorts of British secret societies generally.

These societies are known as much for their upper-class members as for their activities. They’re typically filled with rich kids who come from prestigious families, who know one another from the same boarding school, and who will go on to be rich and powerful adults. The clubs are expressions of privilege and exclusivity, ways for their (almost always male) members to reify themselves as part of a select and close group that is apart from and above the rest.

But university booze clubs like Piers Gav aren’t just a bunch of 19-year-olds behaving like drunken idiots, they are the future governing elite of the United Kingdom. They are an institution of the British upper-class, and thus any story about them is in at least some sense a story about the British upper-class itself, and thus a story about that most British of social issues: the class system.

These clubs are just one stage in lives of exclusivity that have been carved out for the men of the British ruling class, from their first school days to their last club membership.

That insularity is important for understanding how stories like #piggate come out. The UK upper class, by virtue of its life-long exclusivity, is itself quite insular and small — not unlike a secret society that also runs the world’s fifth largest economy.

This means that many of the elite grew up together, went to school together, and knew one another when they were drunken 19-year-old college kids going to drag burlesques and putting their penises inside of dead pig heads. Inevitably, years later, when they become adults, some of them will form professional or personal rivalries, and leak those stories to the press.

Sure.