It only took four paragraphs to forever change David Cameron in the eyes of the Great British Public. They didn’t even cover a page of the unauthorised biography, 

, which came out in 2015. In them, an anonymous MP who had been at Oxford in the 1980s with the former prime minister made an astonishing claim. He said that at a Piers Gaveston party, where Oxford students live out their 

 fantasies, a young Cameron took part in a grisly initiation ceremony. This source claimed — having seen photographic evidence of the deed — that Cameron placed his penis into the mouth of a dead pig. Apparently the animal’s head was resting on the lap of a Piers Gav member when Cameron went to third base with it.

The MP who had been going around telling this story in summer 2014 was deemed “credible” by the authors of 

, although they failed to unearth the supposed picture. This piece of evidence, it would seem, has been tantalisingly lost to history. When it comes to apocryphal artefacts that form part of a people’s mythology, the Russians have the Tsar’s Amber Room, the Israelites have the Ark of the Covenant — and we get a photo of a hammered posho being fellated by a dead hog.

David Cameron at a party during his Oxford days. Not pictured: a pig.


Piggate, as it came to be known, was denounced as “utter nonsense” by the PM, although David Cameron has never been able to shake off the smell of porcine scandal. Seven years on, his tweets are still besieged by wags sharing pig emojis or weird sketches of pigs wearing bikinis. A decent result for Michael Ashcroft, who co-authored 

 with Isabel Oakeshott, even though she would later admit that her source, rather than being a distinguished politician, “could have been slightly deranged”.

Yanking out the pins of hand grenades and hurling them in the direction of senior Tories might seem like an odd career move for Lord Ashcroft, who was once deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. And yet the billionaire businessman, who is a tax exile citizen of Belize, is now perhaps best known for his investigative hatchet jobs. Not all of Ashcroft’s works are so explosive — recent biographies of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Rishi Sunak did not deliver barnyard-grade horror stories. But any cabinet minister is surely worried about the skeletons in their closets that Ashcroft and his team of researchers might uncover if they fall out of favour with him. Ashcroft’s beef with Cameron dates back to 2010, when, after campaigning for the Tories in the general election and chucking £8 million at them, he was denied a senior role in his government.

Lord Ashcroft and Boris Johnson in less acrimonious times


Ashcroft has been criticised for maintaining a standard of sourcing in his books that newspapers would find hard to justify. Craig Oliver, who worked for Cameron, has called Ashcroft “deeply cynical” for drawing on LBJ’s campaign tactic of calling his opponent a pig shagger because it would force him to deny it.

This debate has resurfaced for the publication of 

 which goes after Carrie Johnson and comes out next month. Compared to 

 – and accusations of bestiality aside – Carrie comes across just as badly as Cameron. Ashcroft paints a picture of a master manipulator, who doesn’t have the ability to bend the prime minister’s ear so much as tear it off. He alleges that Carrie set her sights on Boris when he was foreign secretary in Theresa May’s government, asking about how well he was getting on with his wife Marina Wheeler and whether he was “available”.

After they got together and moved into Downing Street, Ashcroft’s sources say, Carrie began muscling in on her partner’s political decisions, pressuring him to sack staff she didn’t like and replacing them with her mates, getting him to reverse-ferret on decisions she didn’t approve of, and issuing WhatsApp orders on his phone. “Carrie will kill me if she doesn’t get the job,” Boris is alleged to have said about appointing Allegra Stratton, the press spokesperson who laughed about Downing Street parties. Sidelined staff responded by instructing taxi drivers ferrying Carrie between meetings to take scenic routes to make her late.

Carrie Johnson is Ashcroft&#8217;s latest target


The book claims that Boris is trapped by his wife, looking for excuses to stay at work late and occasionally letting slip how he really feels, like a POW blinking Morse code in front of his captors. Ashcroft quotes a source who says: “In private moments he would say words to the effect of, ‘Don’t do anything that’s going to make her torture me when I get home. You’ve just got to help me. My life at home’s miserable. You’ve got to find a way to make this bearable for me.’ He’d speak with exasperation in his eyes.”

Anonymous interviews like this have caused a huge stink, and prompted Westminster insiders to huff that Ashcroft has gone “a step too far”, which is hard to square with the pig shagging debacle. Supporters of Boris and Carrie say the couple are mulling over legal action against Ashcroft, whose publishers must be relishing the extra publicity a lawsuit would stir up. A spokesperson for Carrie has blamed the book on “bitter ex-officials” who are using it to wage a “brutal briefing campaign” against her. “She is a private individual who plays no role in government,” they said.

Cameron, according to the Guardian, has “made peace” with Ashcroft’s pasting of him. He now has at least two copies of 

 is not out till 29th March. It’s hard to imagine Carrie wanting to do anything with it except feed it, page by page, into a shredder, and save the author photograph of Ashcroft to use as a dartboard.

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