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Is Britain Ruled by a Secret Pig-Fucking Cabal?

Rituals like sticking your penis into a pig's head are an intrinsic part of the British class system.

A pig's head. Photo via Flickr user Edsel Little

Something very weird happened as soon as the allegations emerged in the Daily Mail that Prime Minister David Cameron had, during his student days at Oxford, stuck "a private part of his anatomy" in a dead pig's mouth—a story upon which Downing Street declined to comment today. While most of us were laughing uncontrollably all evening, political and media figures across the UK Right, from Louise Mensch to James Delingpole, suddenly started insisting that it was no big deal, that he was just a student, that we've all done something embarrassing back in the day, so who cares?

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This is true. There are certainly long and stupid years of my life that, whenever I'm reminded of them, make me want to slam my head into the nearest wall. But even so, I never fucked a dead pig. So the question hangs in the air. Could it be that the entire United Kingdom is ruled by a secret pig fucking cabal? Some ancient society, devoted to the enjoyment of forbidden porcine pleasures, driven wild by its transgressions, with ambitions to take over the world?

This kind of idea is difficult to prove. But I want to suggest that, at the very least, we should take the proposition seriously.

It's no secret that young men, from the age of about 12 until their final slump into total impotence, will try to put their dicks in just about anything. I have vivid memories of a year 7 school friend trying, with all seriousness, to fuck an injection-moulded plastic chair. Over the centuries, it's almost a certainty that more than a few dead pig's heads have been subjected to this kind of erotic attention.

Witless peasants, lonely in their fields since the invention of agriculture, must have occasionally looked at the damply snuffling snouts of their herds, and wondered. Butcher's boys across the world and throughout the centuries have probably independently invented an exciting new pork garnish. Wherever there's been horny idiocy, there will have been pig's heads to provide a small comfort. But Britain is different: only in this country do we then decide that our alleged pig fuckers should get to have nuclear weapons.

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David Cameron is certainly weird enough and fleshy-faced enough for the story to be believable. But if the story is true, the real question isn't why he fucked a dead pig, but how anyone else managed to find out about it. According to the Mail's source, an anonymous MP, the act of forbidden love was part of his initiation into Oxford's Piers Gaveston society; it's also alleged that Count Gottfried von Bismarck, his contemporary at the university, threw dinner parties prominently featuring pig's heads. This was pig fucking raised to the level of high ritual. It fits in to accounts of similar Oxford behavior: we have heard, for instance, the claim that one of the initiations into the Bullingdon Club, of which David Cameron and Boris Johnson were members, is to burn a fifty-pound note in front of a homeless person.

But in fact, the anthropological archive is full of this stuff. Among the Tiv people of West Africa, for instance, it's a fairly common belief that the most powerful members of society are part of a secret organization called the mbatsav, who meet at night to dig up bodies from graves and eat them. The Poro secret society of Liberia, which occasionally functions as a parallel government, is ruled by the commandment ifa mo—do not speak of it. Some kind of initiation rite exists in every culture: I had a Bar Mitzvah, you might have had Confirmation, or you might have chugged a pint of piss during freshman year, and David Cameron is alleged to have fucked a dead pig.

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It seems that the higher up you go in society, the more cruel and grotesque the ritual becomes. There's an obvious reason for all this: for the upper classes, good connections really matter. If you're going to have a secret society, first you need to have a secret. Whether it's singing in screechy adolescent Hebrew or corpse-eating and pig fucking, these initiations help bind people together, and a student society in which everyone knows that everyone else has done something unspeakable to a piece of ham is bound to stay close afterward. If anyone breaks ranks, or acts against the interests of the collective, they can be instantly exposed. Groups like the Bullingdon and the Piers Gaveston societies are not just rugby clubs for the ultra-rich, a vehicle for youthful excess; they're a way of fostering ruling class solidarity.

In a highly stratified society like the UK, where we're still ruled by those chinlessly perverse dweebs who can trace their ancestry to the Norman conquest, necro-bestiality isn't a weird affectation of the aristocratic classes but something intrinsic to the way our country is organized. In places with a greater degree of social mobility, like much of continental Europe, there's less of a scope for this kind of institutional ossification of perversion. But Britain is a profoundly sick society, and where you were born still determines how the rest of your life will pan out. The ruling classes will go to any lengths to keep it that way. These kids know that they might one day end up leading the country, which is why it's essential that they cum in a pig's mouth. It's not just enjoyment, it's class warfare.

There's no way of saying for sure, but it's certainly not beyond the bounds of credibility that they're all doing it. Politicians, bankers, businessmen, journalists, civil servants, everyone: the whole scummy top layer of the UK. It might not have been planned that way, but the constitutional evolution of British politics, the way that it incorporated feudal relics into its democracy right up until the present, made mass aristocratic pig fucking basically inevitable.

The Daily Mail managed to get the pig story because it's serializing a new biography of Cameron, Call Me Dave, by Lord Ashcroft. The front page of today's paper read, in huge letters, REVENGE. The story goes that Ashcroft, a major Tory donor, expected his generosity to be repaid with a position in the 2010 coalition government. He didn't get it, and so the ancient system of initiation-bonding revealed its true purpose. But Ashcroft is also a billionaire, the 37th richest person in the country. He might not have gone to Oxford, but he spends a lot of time with people who did. Ashcroft might have had his revenge, but could the story come back to bite him where it hurts? After all, what strange adventures might he have gotten into?

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