How one little piggy proved the power of the printed word

The piggate scandal is proof that print journalism still holds huge power over digital, writes Raymond Snoddy.

David Cameron may not realise it yet, but he will be forever associated with an unnaturally close relationship with pigs, to his dying day and possibly beyond.

It doesn’t even matter whether there exists, or not, a picture demonstrating that our Prime Minister, once a long time ago, unwisely got himself into intimate contact with a severed pig’s head at an Oxford University rave.

Why is it always Oxford, by the way – Cambridge seems to be a perpetual loser when it comes to boat races, but at least they don’t appear to have quite the same unhealthy appetite for severed pigs heads.

But look, it doesn’t even matter whether Cameron was ever involved in such an incident at a Piers Gaveston society named, apparently after the catamite of Edward II; you have to be terribly well educated to even try to keep track of Oxford scandals.

Maybe there wasn’t even a pig’s head. As the co-author of the unflattering biography, Call Me Dave, Isabel Oakeshott admitted blithely on Channel 4 News: she couldn’t get to the bottom of the source’s allegation “so we merely reported the account that the source gave us.”

You, dear reader, must therefore make your mind up about the plausibility of “piggate” and, after all, it was only a teeny weeny little piggy of an allegation across just two paragraphs in an enormous book that was five years in the making.

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The world is, however, not like that any more. An allegation, a rumour, a scurrilous story has travelled the whole way round the world in less time than it would take an Oxford undergraduate to snort a line of cocaine.

At Twitter headquarters in San Francisco there was initial mystification about how tweets about a pig and a politician should be suddenly trending so powerfully in the UK when the Daily Mail got to work.

There were no less than 280,000 tweets on the piggate hashtag and more than 1 million when you open up the definition to the pig word.

There is no way back from such a pig-storm.

There is, of course, a history of pig and politician stories. According to the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson US President, Lyndon Johnson smeared a political opponent with pig intimacy allegations just to “make the sonofabitch deny it.”

There we have the problem for politicians such as Cameron. How do you issue a denial – if denial at all – when faced with such unusual allegations?

Downing Street officially denying that Prime Minister David Cameron has ever had intimate relations with the severed head of a dead pig at the Piers Gaveston society or anywhere else, hardly cuts the apple-sauce.

Yet the chosen line – we shall not dignify such low-rent allegations with an answer – echoed across government in an unconvincing monotone and scarcely works either.

Surely David Cameron, the former PR man schooled in crisis management of corporate reputations, could have done better than that. Rather than standing on your dignity you might as well just come clean and admit it or deny in detail.

He should remember that even in the pre-Twitter age Max Clifford succeeded, falsely, in condemning the former Secretary of State for Fun, David Mellor, to break his marriage vows forever wearing a Chelsea shirt.

So what have we learned so far from this strange affair?

Obviously it’s another example of the agenda being set on an explosive story, in a newspaper, in print.

You could have floated a Cameron pig story out into the internet and it would have probably sailed on into oblivion.

Even though it was a book serialisation, it took the authority of a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative newspaper to really stick the boot into a serving Conservative Prime Minister under the dramatic headline: REVENGE.

It was only a newspaper too, which could give the weight, depth and detail to the more serious political allegations in the Ashcroft/Oakeshott work – that David Cameron lied on significant matters such as when he knew Lord Oakscott was a “non-dom” taxpayer.

Then there were the small matters of apparently telling another porky over the reasons for refusing Lord Ashcroft a serious Government job and serious incompetence over Libya and Syria.

The coverage also tells us about the current mores on what words can and cannot be used in individual newspapers and broadcasts.

The dear old BBC could not bring itself to say what the actual allegation was and rather pathetically insisted on referring to “bizarre initiation” ceremonies. Radio 4 news was a pig-free zone.

Mercifully The Times, in the context of undermining the allegations against the Prime Minister, did not mince its words in saying what they were, referring to claims of “obscene activities with a pig’s head” although even here the Prime Ministerial member did not get a look in.

The admirable Times cartoonist Peter Brookes even managed to drag poor old Jeremy Corbyn into the affair, quite a feat considering he is vegetarian.

As Cameron holds the pig, Corbyn leaning over the pigsty wall observes: “It should keep its mouth closed on posh ceremonial occasion, like me!”

Enough fun and games.

The incident once again emphasises the impact of the printed word – for good or ill – when it is immediately amplified endlessly through digital, broadcast and social media.

It also emphasises why it is wise to try to preserve print editions and refuse to accept as inevitable the slippery slope towards the morass of the digital world.

And so the allegations go on: Spy claimed Dave asked KGB to get him drugs and PM wanted LABOUR luvvie to be mayor to thwart Johnson.

The latest charges against Cameron on the sliding scale of declining returns are, however, put into the shade by the promised crackdown on charities exploiting the old and vulnerable following a Daily Mail investigation.

It was a newspaper investigation, not digital or social media or Amazon or Google, but old-fashioned reporting by newspaper journalists.

And you can be sure that it will be newspaper reporters who will eventually get to the bottom of the Volkswagen scandal – if they haven’t already.