IT WAS said during the independence referendum last year that David Cameron didn’t want to be remembered in the history books as the Prime Minister who lost Scotland. He must be wishing that he had suffered that ignominious fate, which would at least have been a defeat on a political principle. Now he’s going to be remembered in the history books for the far more ignominious reason that he was the Prime Minister who was not able to deny that he got down and dirty with a dead pig, which is a duff bit of pork in a porn scandal. Derision has been heaped on his hapless hamface in the beastliest political scandal since Caligula ennobled his nag. (Although to be fair, broken down old nags get ennobled in the UK on a regular basis, a seat in the Lords is the usual reward for a failed politician.)

The Prime Minister is as sick as a pig at the revelations about his alleged pig-sticking behaviour. Speaking at a fundraising meeting, he said that the past few days had been summed up by what his doctor had told him earlier that day when he had to receive an injection. “Just a little prick,” said the doc. Which is also what Davie told the pig. The embarrassment could have been far worse however, as large sections of the media have displayed overt concerns over the sources of the story, something that they never bothered their pretty heads too much about when it came to stories about Jeremy Corbyn or Nicola Sturgeon.

It’s not just pigs, there are also allegations of drug-taking with pigs, although that’s not a nice way to refer to members of the establishment. Davie has been no enthusiast for liberalising drug laws, despite it being alleged that he has taken more drugs than every band which appeared on Top of the Pops in the 1980s. Possibly as a result of their psychotropic effects, he thought Supertramp was a great band when everyone knows it was a product of Conservative housing policy. It’s hypocrisy of a snorting kind, but then drug laws only affect plebs, not those who are rich and well-connected enough to imagine that going on a blind date with a pig counts as youthful high spirits. That’s the kind of attitude towards youthful high spirits that you normally only find amongst the British upper classes and the banjo-playing characters of Deliverance. The funniest aspect of the pig porn prosciutto affair has been assorted Tory apologists trying to defend the Prime Minister’s alleged behaviour. There’s been no greater example of public toadyism since Tobovitch Youngovsky told the Moscow Gazette that Catherine the Great’s escapade with a horse reflected rather well on the Tsarina.

It is said that Davie’s descent into disgrace was in revenge for snubbing a powerful and well-connected billionaire whose sense of entitlement is even greater than Davie’s own. That’s the real scandal here, not that a billionaire was snubbed, but that billionaires have reason to believe that because they are ennobled nags who fund the Tory party with pack-bags stuffed full of money, they have a right to buy power in a supposed democracy. The ferocity of the billionaire’s reaction to being sidelined is precisely because that’s the way it usually works in the British pig-sty. He has reason to feel aggrieved. And so do the rest of us, although for very different reasons.

THE events of the past few weeks have confirmed that corruption is endemic in the UK. It is so endemic that it’s not even legally recognised as corruption, instead it’s a part of the honours system. Once you get to be one of the pigs walking on two legs in UK Animal Farm, the defence of your privilege and power becomes the same thing as defence of the state. That’s why the Government of the UK now describes the leader of the opposition as a threat to national security. He’s a threat to the privilege of ennobled nags and people who think sexual congress with dead farmyard animals counts as hight spirits – but only if you went to an expensive public school. Otherwise it’s an episode of Jerry Springer.

It is for the same reasons of defence of privilege that an army general can threaten a coup d’etat if a democratically-elected government downgrades the armed forces below what the generals think they ought to be. In this general’s case, that seems to be an insistence that the UK is perpetually at war somewhere. This is what they mean by punching above our weight – killing people in a foreign land where we have no business being.

The UK has more admirals than it has ships, more generals than regiments, and most of them are like cabinet ministers in that they are products of expensive private schools and scions of the upper middle classes. They’re not going to tolerate losing any more of their toys at the behest of the oiks. These are the same folk who told Scotland during the independence referendum that we needed the might of the UK to defend us against threats from outer space, because a civilisation which possesses technology allowing it to navigate the vast gulfs of interstellar space is going to be deterred by a nuclear submarine that can’t even manage a successful orbit of the Isle of Skye.

We live in a pig-sty which is defended by armed forces whose leaders believe that they have the right to declare war on their own people if the people don’t supply the generals with enough wars and nuclear explosives. Yet no action is being taken against a man who doesn’t seem to understand what his job is. As a soldier in a democratic state his job is to do what an elected government tells him to do. If he can’t grasp that simple fact, he’s got no right to his job. But the generals are responsible to men from the same small social group with more money than morals who secured high office with secret rituals on the back of a pig.

The fate of a pig’s head and a Prime Minister who is the laughing pork stock of the planet are the least of our worries.