pigggate

Welcome to the second instalment of Frank Bukowski’s serialisation of excerpts from Call Me Dave, the unauthorised biography of David Cameron, by Michael Ashcroft & Isabel Oakeshott.

Phew, I’m breathless. And I’ve only just read the first chapter. Already it feels like I’ve lifted the lid on a Pandora’s Box and peered into a very dark and murky world, nothing like what I expected.

It’s as though, well, the person who appears on our television screens every night, whose words ring out good and true from our radio sets, whose sagacious pronouncements are quoted in the media as the wisdom of our great leader and Prime Minister David Cameron, are in fact the lines of an actor. An imposter, pretending to be someone he isn’t. Feigning values and standards that couldn’t be further from his own.

As I read Chapter 1 it felt as though the scales were finally falling from my eyes. As if my illusions about the establishment, the great and the good who set themselves up as our leaders and betters have been, if not a little dented by a light traffic incident at the crossroads, perhaps shattered forever.

But enough. I’ll let Lord ‘revenge is sweet’ Ashcroft and Ms Oakeshott pick up the story, from pp3-5

“Chapter 1 Chipping Snorton

New Year’s Eve, 2008. In the grounds of a honeycomb-coloured Cotswold farm, thudding music from a giant marquee reverberated into the night…

The setting was a property in Sarsden, epicentre of the infamous Chipping Norton set. Inside the marquee, more than 500 of the richest and most powerful people in Britain were seeing in the New Year in style…

It was the annual New Year bash for ‘the set’, one of society’s hottest tickets, a party so exclusive and impenetrable by the paparazzi that guests conditioned to restraining themselves at social occasions for fear of capture on camera were able to relax…

The guest list was hand-picked and tightly controlled… [including] the Queen Bee of them all Rebekah [Brooks nee] Wade. Flame-haired protégé of Rupert Murdoch…

Every potential invitee required the approval of all – a process designed to ensure nobody inappropriate slipped through the net.

Among the guests that night was David Cameron, then Leader of the Opposition, and his wife Samantha, who live a mile or two away in the hamlet of Dean…

The party was in full swing – loud, boozy and perhaps not entirely free of class-A drugs… social gatherings among the upper echelons of society in this part of west Oxfordshire have acquired a reputation for featuring narcotics. So much so that some affectionately dub Chipping Norton ‘Chipping Snorton’.

As the clock approached midnight, guests in varying conditions trooped out of the marquee for a spectacular firework display. Many seemed euphoric, including Mrs Cameron… dragging on a cigarette…

Not everyone was happy, however. A newspaper executive well used to scenes of excess reveals being shocked at the concentration of power and money.

‘It was incredible to see all these people letting their hair down. But something felt wrong. There were just too many people in too many powerful positions, too close to each other. I remember saying to the person I was with, “This will end in tears.” It wasn’t right.’

Emerging from the toilets later that evening, the former newsman, a working-class boy made good, bumped into Cameron.

‘You’re not one of us, are you?’ the leader of the Opposition quipped cheerfully. The guest was left wondering whether the remark was a reference to his politics, his social status, or both.”

Not one of us. So there it is. At least now it’s in the open, and we know without any doubt that old Etonian David Cameron is a bit of a closet snob. Who’da thunk it. Despite his claims to be on the side of working people, Mad Dave is a raging toff who looks down his nose at ‘commoners’. Hell, if you shook his hand, he’d probably go and wash it.

But hey, that’s not all. According to pp5-6, he and his prim and proper missus are also a couple of raging pissheads:

“A first-hand account of a private Conservative Party fundraiser held at the Georgian stately home of Cameron’s millionaire friend and neighbour Lord Chadlington, for example, makes unedifying reading…

There was a huge marquee full of ladies with big hair and even bigger jewellery. The entertainment for the evening was Dave in conversation with Jeremy Clarkson, who seemed to be smashed off his face. There was a lot of drink around. David was loving the whole laddishness of it…

There are other embarrassing snippets. One member of the set has told how the Prime Minister became so inebriated… that he lost his mobile phone. ‘He was wandering around drunk, asking if anyone had seen it.’

When she feels as if she is in safe company, Samantha herself can be extraordinarily indiscreet, once regaling guests at a private party with a colourful account of how she and Cameron became so intoxicated on holiday in Morocco that they vomited.”

What this chapter tells me most of all is that Mad Dave and his Tory friends aren’t really what they pretend to be in public. They never were. All that posturing as paragons of virtue and propriety – those qualities we thought entitled their positions of power and influence over us – was all bullshit. A big act. All along it turned out they were just a bunch of pigs in posh clothing. Deeply privileged, snobbish pigs. An inward-looking club of wasters and ne’er do wells whose friends number some of the shadiest characters on the planet.

Mad Dave’s best friends are people like Rebekah Brooks, the newspaper editor whose staff thought it was fun to hack the mobile phones of murdered teenage girls. And Jeremy Clarkson, famous for calling Asian men “slopes”, and naming his pet black dog “Didier Dogba”. A drinking buddy whose opinion of striking public sector workers is that they “should all be shot… I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families”?

An able-bodied mucker who parks his cars in disabled bays because he doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself, who casually uses the ‘N’ word and describes Mexican people as “lazy, flatulent, feckless, overweight”.

A close confidant who refers to former Labour Leader Gordon Brown as a “one-eyed Scottish idiot”, and who thinks it appropriate to tie a dead cow to the roof of a Chevy Camaro before reversing the car and flinging the animal to the ground, for a laugh.

The kind of friend who, while being filmed driving a lorry, has been known to quip hilariously: “What matters to lorry drivers? Murdering prostitutes? Fuel economy?”

My question is, Mad Dave. As our beloved PM and the UK’s foremost ambassador on the world stage, responsible for our immigration, social, economic and foreign policies (and lest we forget, the man with your finger on our nuclear button) do you really think it’s okay to hang out with unreconstructed racists whose social and political views would probably get them excluded from the BNP? If that’s your idea of good judgement, god help us.

Welcome to the world of spin, Mad Dave.

Finally, here’s a great #piggate video that I didn’t have room to fit in Mad Dave 1 last week, about Mad Dave’s pigrophilia habit. Quality.

I can’t wait for Chapter 2.

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