Cameron-China-GETTY

UK Prime Minister David Cameron

All of this posh-boy behaviour is mostly cringeworthy rather than threatening. But its function is crucial: where power is concentrated and passed between fathers and sons, the sexual humiliation of initiation serves as a rite of passage into the most exclusive club in society, the ruling class.

Class is just as crucial as sex and power. Cameron, after all, was also a member of the Bullingdon Club, a dining society notorious for nights out that ended in the violent destruction of restaurants and bars. Humiliating the “oiks” was their goal, demonstrating to the unsuspecting barmaid, customer, or restaurant-owner their weakness before the savagery of wealth and privilege. “What it basically involved was getting drunk and standing on restaurant tables, shouting about ‘f***ng plebs’”, one Tory MP who left the Bullingdon Club remembers. “It was all about despising poor people.”

Sex and violence, class and power, bonding rituals help to unite these disparate features of inequality into (literally) naked displays of ruling class anarchism. Members of the club share a common humiliation; members of the public share a double humiliation by being reminded we are all pigs’ heads, props to be used and abused in the formalities of passing power from one generation of inherited rulers to another.

The tragedy of British democracy is that we’re so immune to scandal that this revelation will probably prove, in the long run, relatively harmless to Cameron. After all, we have former prime ministers who seem to have been complicit in covering up paedophilia, and another who allegedly engaged directly in this far more serious act. Put in that context, Cameron’s poke-in-a-pig becomes something of a bad-taste joke.

Cameron’s unnatural union with a dead pig’s mouth tells us much about him (Cat Boyd, The National)

And thus part of the reason why the British are so ready to believe Lord Ashcroft’s story, aside from the fact that Ashcroft is a top-tier Establishment figure in a country with absurdly plaintiff-friendly libel laws, is that Cameron’s ideological training is already well understood by the public. There is nothing likable about such a background, particularly when the ruling class it produces is waging a war on the poor and disabled that would have made Thatcher blush.

So to then hear that the guy at the top of that pyramid was peer-pressured into putting his dick in a pig’s mouth or risk not being included in a club of nasty, entitled people, it creates a much more satisfying reaction than mere laughter. A figure of terror becomes a figure of ridicule, a reversal like the boggarts in Harry Potter, who impersonate your worst nightmares until you can cast a spell on them that makes them look absurd.

What The British Are Really Laughing At (TheLeveller)

Thanks Zeroy

(Getty)

Sponsored Link

Related posts:

Uh Oh Bombs For Peace Good Morning, Britain May Day

40 thoughts on “A Class Act”

  1. Liam O'Flaherty

    What a load of pseudo, half baked bollocks. What Cameron did was weird. But to say that putting your todger in a pig, is ‘crucial’ or a ‘rite of passage’ is even weirder. Tin foil hat lunacy.

    Wait until that journalist hears about the power the Knights of the Campanile wield…..

    2. Mr. T.

      “Wait until that journalist hears about the power the Knights of the Campanile wield”

      Tin Foil hat lunacy.

  3. Spaghetti Hoop

    British journos can attack their class structure all they like – it won’t change it nor the deranged practices of the aristocracy.

    His last paragraph is spot on though – this pig n’ coke story is more about immunity. What the rest of the week’s papers will turn to is how one’s actions before assuming public office do/don’t affect your reputation. We’re back to Bill Clinton-gate(s).

    2. CousinJack

      We need to deal with our class structure which is much more insidious and hidden than in Britain, social mobility is greater in the UK than Ireland.

  5. wearnicehats

    I’d hate for some of the things I did at college to become common knowledge – bad enough being reminded of them every now and again in close company

    This is just childish revenge by Ashcroft – one old tory who didn’t get what he wanted acting like a 10 year old by exposing (pardon the pun) another old tory for acting like a 10 year old.

    Yesterday’s news

    1. Medium Sized C

      Referring to the leader of the opposition as a threat to national security is of far more concern to me.

      2. wearnicehats

        wellll he didn’t really. He referred to Corbyn’s Labour Party’s potential policies being so. Corbyn’s history as an IRA sympathiser doesn’t help..

        It’s all good news for Cameron in the shortterm though as the British public won’t vote for Labour under Corbyn but the chances of him lasting realistically aren’t high – the knives will be out within a year

        1. Medium Sized C

          He said what he said.

          You can twist that how you want, but he said that an opposition party were a threat to security and that message has been repeated.

    2. Clampers Outside!

      I hear your point but… having these guys go around high and mighty, with imagined airs and graces of ‘class’ serves no one.
      So a little exposure that these people are just as ‘common’ as anyone else irrespective of their college or family wealth is a good thing in my book.

      1. Dόn Pídgéόní

        I also find it slightly alarming that someone who is supposed to represent all of the UK belonged to a club holding such views of most of the UK i.e. anyone not like them.

      2. Spaghetti Hoop

        But that only insults the unprivileged – as if to act like a scumbag somehow connects a Bullingdon Club toff to the ‘common’ people – most of whom would have far better manners than these spoiled brats. There is no excuse for bad behaviour, especially the lame one of ‘letting loose from acting so proper’.

    2. sp

      Yep. And the “the things I did in college…” argument makes no sense. Are people saying that they also put their willies in a pig?

  10. perricrisptayto

    Millionaire politico thinks most people are beneath him.
    There’s a surprise now.
    Lucky we don’t have that sort over here.

Comments are closed.

Sponsored Link
Broadsheet.ie