This isn’t Moffat-related, but Britain is currently rocked by a scandal about the Prime Minister that was revealed as part of a tell-all biography yesterday: allegedly, while he was at university, David Cameron joined a posh club with an initiation rite where he had to “put a private part of his anatomy” into a dead pig’s mouth. Naturally, the British press is running wild (the Guardian has a round-up of the best Twitter responses here, which I highly recommend) with the scandal, which has been named “Piggate” (since the Watergate scandal, all British political scandals, no matter how minor, have been given a nickname with the suffix “-gate”). 

This isn’t the first time Cameron’s antics during university have shocked the public; he (along with many of his Parliament colleagues) was also a member of the infamous Bullingdon club:

The aim of the Bullingdon Club is ostensibly to dress up fancy with the chaps, get blind drunk at an expensive restaurant or private dining room, and trash the place – because they can afford to pay for the damages without doing a day’s work. Among their known initiation rites, they are said to have to burn a £50 [~$76] bill in front of a homeless person.

(From here, which talks about how Piggate relates to class, but trigger warning for child abuse/sexual abuse in the article - recently it’s come to light that Parliament ignored child abusers within its midst.)

Cameron initially refused to comment on the allegations and members of his party claimed this was a fairly normal thing for students to do (much to the delight of the British public, of course).

Like other scandals around Cameron, such as pastygate*, this highlights the disconnect in Cameron and his cronies (rich white men who all went to the same universities and are all interconnected but believe they have gained everything on merit and everyone else is beneath them) and the general British population. There’s also a sense of despair among many members of the public** that men so out of touch with normality are in charge of people’s literal lives (for example, in trying to reduce the number of people “claiming” to be disabled to get money, the government has declared multiple people fit to work who subsequently died within days).

Anyway, I know a lot of people who read STFU-Moffat aren’t British so in case any of you are confused about why suddenly everyone in Britain is making pig jokes, this is why.

- C

*The Conservatives wanted to increase the taxes on hot pasties, a food associated with working-class men. The Chancellor was asked when he has last eaten a pasty and revealed (to everyone’s horror) that he couldn’t remember when he had last eaten one. David Cameron then claimed he’d eaten one at Leeds Railway Station, but some journalists investigated this claim and found that there was nowhere to buy pasties from at Leeds Railways Station at the time Cameron claimed. It was a big scandal, which probably tells you a lot about the British press.

**Although sadly not all or the Conservatives wouldn’t have won the election