Credit where it is due

‘Why “a plethora of plastic”?’ I hear nobody asking. But I’m used to talking to nobody in particular, so I’ll answer anyway.

Praise (or blame, as the case may be) my daughter. Shortly before her English Language GCSE earlier this year she looked up all sorts of interesting words that she might use during the exam. One of these was ‘plethora’. During the exam she decided to write a speech criticizing consumerist culture (go Esther!), and in an inspired moment came up with the phrase ‘plethora of plastic’. I was suitably impressed and so, I think, was she: when she told me she gave the sort of delighted fist pump usually performed by female tennis players after winning a particularly important point.

It might be thought, therefore, that I have stolen the phrase from my own daughter. But I prefer to think of it as a kind of tribute to her. If she ever gets her band in gear and releases an album entitled ‘A Plethora of Plastic’, then she can point to this post to demonstrate that, far from paying her own tribute to an obscure and somewhat ranty blog, the album title does in fact stem from her own inventive genius.

So, thanks Esther, I hope you don't mind me appropriating your phrase. But it will always be yours!

No more than a bloodsport?

Cameron looking happy...

I have to confess to feeling some guilt at my enthusiastic participation in piggate. Normally I detest and avoid the type of lynch-mob, feeding frenzy on social media. It’s just another version of playground bullying. Had Dave, say, done whatever he is alleged to have done with a dead pig while at Eton, and had word got around, you can guarantee that the taunts would have been merciless and would have gone on long after young Dave was reduced to sobbing into his pillow. Now we roll out the mockery (as I have done) on Twitter, Facebook and blogs, hoping to hurt and humiliate the Prime Minister. It is hardly edifying behaviour, and it contains a streak of nasty sadism—and I have reflected that it seems to bring out a side in me of which I’m not that proud. Indeed, it is reminiscent of the bloodsports that Cameron loves so much and most of the rest of us find so distasteful. (I wonder, does Cameron feel like the pursued fox right now?) Oh, to be as noble as Jeremy Corbyn and not stoop to such personal attacks and tittle tattle. I genuinely admire those who are able to stay serenely aloof from the story, and one day (which will probably be tomorrow) I shall likely look back, ever so slightly appalled, at my gleeful response.

I can’t offer much justification for it. Still, I would say the following. First, the Tories and the Tory-dominated press have never refrained from launching personal attacks on their political opponents, many of which have been utterly outrageous. Ed Miliband, a thoroughly decent man whatever one thinks of his leadership abilities, was pilloried relentlessly. The Sun labelled Corbyn ‘disgusting’ for not singing the national anthem (I’d say he demonstrated admirable taste in refusing to sing what must surely be a leading contender for the world’s worst national anthem; and anyway, coming from a newspaper that hacked into a murdered girl’s phone, one has to wonder at just what The Sun understands by ‘disgusting’). Cameron’s mate, Jeremy Clarkson, thought it fine to ridicule Gordon Brown for being blind in one eye. And so on. While it may not be impressive for those of us on the left to vacate the moral high ground (and let’s face it, leftism is morally superior to the politics of the Right), it is certainly satisfying every now and then to fight back against the bullies of the right.

Second, this is not really about a dead pig and whatever sexual act is alleged to have been performed on with it. I’m pretty broad-minded and laissez-faire about what people get up to in their private lives. Dead pigs are not my thing, but I’m really not that bothered if they happen to be somebody else’s thing. No, this is about the elitist, poor-despising, riotous Piers Gaveston Society into which the dead pig act was allegedly an initiation ritual. It’s about a social and political class whose sense of entitlement affects us all. That the TV schedules are full of programmes that criticize, ridicule and mock the poor and those on benefits stems ultimately from the Bullingdon and Piers Gaveston attitudes of Cameron and others like him who believe they constitute the natural ruling class. Piggate allows us to turn the spotlight briefly back on this ‘ruling’ class.

Ultimately, therefore, this is political, not personal. I’m sure in many ways Cameron is a decent, likeable man; I certainly have no wish to inflict gratuitous suffering on him as a human being. But he represents—and he has taken it upon himself to represent—a set of values that has increased economic inequality and social injustice, creating poverty, hardship, suffering and insecurity for vast numbers of the population. If the route to challenging and undermining those values goes via the Prime Minister’s relations with a dead pig’s head, then there is possibly a defence to taking that route.

"If you're leader, you've got to believe in something"

The headline-grabbing details emerging from Michael Ashcroft’s biography of David Cameron are, of course, a useful distraction for the government from too much attention being paid to the damage it is wreaking on Britain. Ashcroft and the Daily Mail want to hurt the Prime Minister but they don’t want to harm the Tories—and they’ve timed it brilliantly. With a bit of luck, they’ll be thinking, Cameron will resign earlier than he was intending, to be succeeded by Osborne/Johnson/May who will proceed to trounce Corbyn at the next election. Meanwhile, fun can be had by all, and serious stuff like people killing themselves because of the policies of the DWP or ludicrous decisions to build £24bn nuclear power plants can be safely buried. By the time the Tories have finished, a dead pig’s head may be an apt symbol for Britain. Maybe that’s the point: Cameron just wants to relive his youthful shenanigans, only on a larger, more grandly symbolic scale.

Still, while it may not be possible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, the Ashcroft revelations do provide some useful insight into our esteemed Prime Minister. For example, we have discovered that Maggie Thatcher—the only Tory PM in living memory about whom there is not, thus far, any interesting sexual allegations—thought that Cameron was shallow: “If you’re leader, you’ve got to believe in something”, she is supposed to have said when musing on Dave’s abilities.

I’ve always thought this about Cameron. Essentially he’s just a smart but vacuous PR man. This is a man who is prepared to damage the Union for a short-term electoral advantage; to risk membership of the EU purely to strengthen his own position in the Conservative Party; to waffle on about the Big Society (or maybe that should be Pig Society?) for a bit, then forget about it, without anyone being much the wiser for what on earth he was going on about in the first place. I see lots of political calculations with Cameron, and a great deal of focus on presentation, but little of substance.

What does he believe? Probably not much. Cameron has admitted that his religious beliefs consist of a vague, loose and casual Anglicanism (which doesn’t stop him from wittering on about Britain having ‘Christian’ values), and I doubt there is anything more solid about his political beliefs. He is, after all, a man who has known privilege all his life; in so far as he has a vision, it has been forged in the ancient buildings of Eton and Oxford, in the riotous revels of the Bullingdon Club and the foxhunting and parties of Chipping Norton. He is essentially clueless about the experience of anyone other than members of a narrow social elite.

Cameron in his element

I suspect his principles amount to the following: inequality is natural, and so too is privilege; poverty is not good, but by and large it is the poor, rather than the wealthy, who need to take responsibility for their situation; that responsibility involves working hard, not complaining, and accepting that some people are privileged and that society is better off for it; those that don’t work hard or do complain deserve little sympathy.

I’ve often wondered why Cameron is in politics at all. No doubt he enjoys the kudos of being Prime Minister and the glamour of high office (his self-satisfied comment about the queen ‘purring’ at him down the phone seems to be evidence of this), and he will certainly be proud of his role in restoring, as he would see it, the Tories to their natural position of power. But whereas Thatcher, Blair and Brown all seemed driven to seize and hold onto office for as long as possible, Cameron’s calm announcement that he will be standing down before the next election indicates a strange lack of enthusiasm about his job.

Perhaps he sees being Prime Minister as something that will look good on his CV. I’m sure that I once read somewhere that George W. Bush believed that being President of the United States would improve his chances of getting the job he really wanted: Commissioner of Baseball. Maybe Cameron hopes that being Prime Minister is a good stepping stone to an office that he really wants. Something like Master of the Heythrop Hunt, possibly.

Prime Ministers and dead pigs

When I first heard that David Cameron had allegedly had intimate relations with a dead pig I thought, hang on, SamCam might not be everyone’s type but she’s not that bad. But no, it turns out that the dead pig in question was an actual dead pig, or at least the head of one. So that makes three male Tory Prime Ministers in a row about whom rumours of embarrassing sexual pasts abound: Ted Heath (either completely asexual or a paedophile depending on whom you believe), John Major (Edwina Currie) and now Dave (dead pig).

I imagine there might be some interesting questions asked in the Cameron household over their supper of pork chops (so lovingly prepared by Dave in his own special way), which Dave will doubtless bat back with the response he seems to have settled upon:

“Daddy, all the nasty kids at school are saying that you once had sex with a dead pig. Is it true?”

“Yes, David,” Samantha might chip in. “I’d quite like to know the answer to this too.”

Pausing his game of Fruit Ninja, our sterling Prime Minister puts on his ‘this is completely unacceptable’ face and replies: “I refuse to dignify this allegation with any comment.”

At which any sensible family would hastily remove all Peppa Pig paraphernalia to a safe place.

Ed reacts on being introduced to Dave's first girlfriend

There’s no doubt that all this suggests an impressively varied taste on the part of the Prime Minister: to SamCam, Nick Clegg and the poor, we can now add dead pigs. It might also explain why Ed Miliband had such a problem with that bacon sandwich.

The Prime Minister used to bang on about the dangers of pornography and its influence on children. Perhaps back in his Eton days he once stumbled across some bestiality and necrophilia and knows only too well the effect of viewing such things.

Anyway, Dave is always quite keen to impress upon the nation is own blokey manliness. So he was probably pleased that only days after allegations circulated about Jeremy Corbyn having an affair with Diane Abbott in the 1970s, the Prime Minister was able to trump this evidence of hot-blooded carnality in the Leader of the Opposition by someone dredging up one of his own rumoured former lovers. And quite a babe she was too.

The Prime Minister is also firmly opposed to any reform of drugs legislation, thereby ensuring that thousands of people will be criminalized for what is generally little more than youthful dabbling and adventure. But what do we learn? It seems that Dave was merrily puffing away on weed through his student years. Hypocrisy? Of course not. You see, Dave is rich, posh and privileged, and it’s okay for the rich, posh and privileged to take drugs, get intimate with dead pigs and join riotous clubs like the Bullingdon Club, but perish the thought that the poor do any such things.

There was one further shocking revelation this week, and for which Dave should really consider his position as Prime Minister. It turns out he was a fan of Supertramp. I know: Supertramp?! Dave really will do well to survive that allegation.