What our reaction to Piggate tells us

It doesn't surprise me that David Cameron shagged a pig while at Oxford. I'd almost be more surprised if he hadn't. Having spent three years at Cambridge (similar to Oxford in the sense that it's the same) I'm fully aware that the posher you are, the more morally questionable you are - something I've illustrated with the following UN-approved - sorry, un-approved - scale: 

Posh level 1 - You've never bought from the reduced section in Sainsbury's: occasional restaurant-trashing.

Posh level 2 - Your parents have more than one car but don’t opt for a money-saving multi-car insurance deal: weekly arson, possibly some incest. 

Posh level 3 - You've ordered Pizza without a voucher code: hourly necro-bestiality. 

You might think I'm kidding, but I'm not; in fact kidding is actually what Oxbridge students call sex with a goat. (Well, most of us. Not me. I didn’t need to join a society populated primarily by attention-seeking, white, public school boys to harvest a sense of identity while at University, and I was too busy with The Footlights anyway.) 

Basically, because I'm aware of Cameron's background, the Piggate allegation doesn't interest me in and of itself. What does interest me is the following:

Had it been alleged that Jeremy Corbyn shagged a pig, or even shagged a pig in a collective sense in order to bring about the peace process, I'd have been angry. The allegations would have represented yet another toxic personal attack by the right-wing press, drawing attention away from politics and towards superfluous, fabricated nonsense. 

But, when the allegations were levied towards Cameron, I wasn't angry. In fact I was pretty chuffed. Finally, a scandal that could seriously hurt the Conservatives! Wahey! Hi-5s all round! Crack open the dick jokes! Crack open the Ferrero Rocher! Crack open the champagne! Wait, no, I’m a socialist – crack open the Lilt! Then share it!

And I wasn't the only one. Plenty of politically engaged, intelligent, left-wing individuals pigged out on pig jokes. Navigating Facebook became like swimming through swine - a sort of bizarre test-of-faith-nightmare for anyone not allowed pork; PHD students reading ‘the negative impact of dick jokes on representative democracy’ took a break to Photoshop Cameron onto the Babe poster; even my mum muttered something about The Conservatives needing oinkment, probably. The only man in Britain who didn’t get involved was Jeremy Corbyn, and that’s just because he was too busy not singing Living on a Prayer at a Bon Jovi concert. The shit. 

In essence, millions saw a chance to land a blow to the conservatives, and took it. What's upsetting, though, is that this shouldn't be what it takes to land a blow at all. Piggate has got to be one of the least immoral things Cameron has ever been involved with. Finding out David Cameron fucked a pig is a bit like finding out Idi Amin once put some food-waste in with his recycling, or that Voldemort briefly torrented 'Orange is the New Black' before installing Netflix in a whirlwind of guilt: pretty trivial, in the scheme of things. It would be much more appropriate if, say, killing citizens with drone strikes or admitting a shamefully small number of refugees was the kind of thing to throw Cameron's reputation off a cliff. 

Sadly it isn't though, and the reaction to Piggate shows that while very few of us are above using scandal to hurt a political figure like David Cameron, that’s only because using politics simply hasn’t worked. 

So, if Cameron really, properly suffers from Piggate (which he probably won’t, because the allegations were printed by The Mail, implying they think necro-bestiality is less despicable than ‘a man with a beard’ in the eyes of the public), we’ll have to draw the following conclusion: scandal is the future. The future of political engagement. The future of peace. Cameron bans hugs? Doesn’t matter. Cameron bombs a baby-sloth sanctuary in order to fund Mrs. Brown’s Boys? Ignore it. Just shout oink. Repeatedly. Out of the window. 

It’s the only way.

Jeremy Corbyn vs. The Right Wing Press

This week, I visited The Mail Online. 

I say 'visited'; I'm not sure that's the most appropriate verb to describe my edging cautiously towards The Mail's frothing maw while squinting to avoid being blinded by some projectile bile. It's cliché to point it out, but The Mail is a whole different kind of awful. Rumours suggest that Dave Benson Phillips would actually harvest the gunge used in Get Your Own Back by wringing a copy of The Mail out into a bath before detoxifying the resultant slime via a complex and expensive purification process. Of course, Phillips resented the purification: he famously despised the pushy parents and embarrassing uncles who appeared on the programme and wanted them to burn with the full force of The Mail's ultra-potent mucus; but the BBC wouldn't have it.

Anyway, the reason I ventured into the web's most popular cesspit of semi-pornographic hate™ was to see how Jeremy Corbyn has been treated by the kind of journalists who like the most important word of any given headline to be written in capitals. It turns out, not that kindly. Apparently his first few days as party leader have been riddled with 'gaffes', 'blunders' and 'mis-steps' - all of which sound like segment titles in a David Seaman compilation DVD. 

However, Jeremy Corbyn isn't like most politicians. He's less moulded, less polished, and is bursting with cheeky, idiosyncratic quirks like knitted jumpers and principles. So although he'll inevitably face these kinds of attacks from the right wing press, what their impact will be isn't so clear. Some have suggested being rough around the edges will allow jibes to be more easily deflected, and will essentially give him 'The Farage Factor' (also a talent-show format I'm developing, detailed below); others argue his lack of polish will make him more vulnerable to 'gaffes' such as losing his temper or picking the ball up outside the penalty area, upon which the press will capitalise.

[The Farage Factor: Every week Nigel Farage has to audition to a panel of judges who are judging him on whether or not he is Nigel Farage. The programme is edited such that it sometimes looks like Nigel Farage is going to be rubbish at being Nigel Farage (e.g. he is wearing a Natalie Bennett mask in the pre-audition interview), but then he is actually really good at it (he takes off the mask during the audition to reveal he is Nigel Farage), and sometimes so it looks like he could be really good at being Nigel Farage (e.g. he has brought his birth-certificate along to the audition) but then he turns out to be rubbish at it (he accidentally shows the judges Natalie Bennett's birth certificate). The series is 14 weeks long and concludes on Pancake day to give Farage a shot at the coveted 'Pancake Day Number 1'.]

I fall more into the first category. Personally I think it's much easier for someone whose personality is the product of a group brainstorm to slip up than it is for someone like Jeremy Corbyn. When David Cameron says 'of course I'd rather you supported West Ham' and looks about as comfortable as someone who's made a misjudged ISIS ad-lib during the emotional climax of their best-man's speech, it's easy to ridicule, because it exposes something contrived. Corbyn's personality isn't contrived, and what are framed as his 'mis-steps' tend to be consciously controversial decisions. The press will still use these against him, but we'll know he meant them, and controversy is already pretty compatible with how he presents himself. 

That said, reading The Mail made me realise something: to the right wing press it doesn't really matter what Jeremy Corbyn's like, or what he does. Every aspect of him and his first few days as Labour Leader have been presented in a negative light, whether it's a neutral statement, a choice of clothes, or tipping the ball over the cross-bar. The Mail can frame literally anything using its own false-narrative, and that's exactly what it chooses to do. To illustrate this, I'd like to include an article The Mail actually wrote about me leaving home earlier this week. I thought the move went pretty smoothly, though it was a shame we couldn't fit my mum in the car. Anyway, this was The Mail's take:

Boy, 21, moves to NEW Wimbledon home but REFUSES to bring his mother

Adrian Gray, 21, ended a turbulent week by moving to a new home in Wimbledon on Sunday. But his mother was left red-faced after being shunned by her son, who refused to take her in the car, citing 'lack of space.'

The Mail can exclusively reveal that Gray's mother has known him since BIRTH and shares HALF of her precious 'genetic material' with him. However, the Oxbridge-educated Gray seemed ungrateful, choosing to place his bike in the back of the car rather than his loving mother, who was seen in TEARS just weeks earlier, at the cinema. 

Gray, looking to become a tutor, had spent much of the week organising a 'DBS check', which proves whether or not he is a CRIMINAL. It is unclear why Gray felt the need to check this, though sources have suggested it may be because it is 'the law'. Others are not so sure. 

[3 year old photo of my mum rubbing her face so it looks like she might be crying. Caption: Jeremy Corbyn is a cunt.]

Once at the house, Gray and his father, 54, proceeded to move possessions from the car and into the house, in what can only be described as a reverse-BURGLARY. One source claimed that 'Every four to five seconds Gray appeared to shut his eyes briefly, before instantly re-opening them, suggesting he cannot bear the sight of his own father for more than a few seconds'.

Gray refused to comment on the accusations after being approached for one in his sleep.

Donald Trump: A British Perspective

It’s fun to mock the Americans. In fact it’s a bit of a tradition in this country, carrying a cultural significance somewhere between that of Morris Dancing and 'The National Lottery: In It to Win It'. It’s also fine. No-one feels guilty for it, probably because Americans are actually better off than we are and to be honest we're a bit jealous. For comparison, we don’t spend that much time ridiculing the Sudanese with their overwhelming poverty and war-torn recent history. No, that would be cruel. We just sell them weapons and leave it at that.

However jealous we may be, though, Donald Trump makes it hard not to laugh. Sure, it's difficult to gauge what kind of level he's operating on (he could be an actual moron; he could also be Sacha Baron Cohen in a fat-suit; chances are he's somewhere in between but we just don't know), but British coverage of his anti-Mexican/anti-woman/anti-arbitrary-oppressed-minority campaign has been tinged with self-satisfaction. The fact that he could, potentially, at some point, get elected, makes us feel pretty smug. 

Of course this is the wrong way to react, for two reasons. Firstly, as you may have noticed, every now and then decisions made by the American government make some kind of impact on other parts of the world. It's only every so often, and I can't think of any recent examples, but it does happen. Secondly, it's not like we're any better really, is it? Boris Johnson, for instance, is The Mayor of London. I don't know about you, but that reeks to me of a poor decision: the most ethnically diverse city in Europe is run not by a respectable politician but by a man that looks like the Hitler Youth alternative to Mr Blobby. 'Herr Flobblesquatch and his treehouse of racially pure fun' - that's what we voted for.

But Johnson and Trump have a surprising amount in common. Like London's bumbling toff, Trump has managed to make total incompetence one of his selling points: a perverse form of self-marketing usually reserved for reality TV stars and children between the ages of 1 and 4. We don't know what they're going to do next, but we do know it might involve some poo and a badly drawn picture of a starfish, so we stick a camera on them and woop whenever they start dribbling. This is the Trump tactic. He's a walking atrocity, but it's earned him the electorate's attention. Moreover, because of his immense fallibility, Trump appears slightly more human than his rivals. Not physically of course - he still looks like a golden retriever egg - but by being an outspoken prick he is at least demonstrating an extremely common human trait. This is advantageous, particularly in a world of voters bored of robot politicians showcasing about the same emotional range as Hayden Christensen's Anakin.*

*Now, you might point out that David Cameron managed to win the UK general election, and he emits all the warmth and humanity of your average hub-cap; in fact if you put a crying toddler in a room containing only him and a Dyson Airblade, the toddler would crawl towards and passionately hug the latter. This is true, but to be fair he only he only won the election against another, weaker robot - one presumably built by the losing team in an episode of scrapheap challenge, and with its central computer sourced from a discarded Tamagotchi.

Anyway, Trump's probably not going to win, but if he does we'll be witness to a social experiment akin to when someone lets their dog take the wheel of their car - except the car's already going at about 200mph, and the dog is convinced it can drive. From a British perspective, I hope this doesn't happen. Not because I wouldn't find it entertaining - just with America being reduced to rubble, it'll no longer be okay to take the piss.