At last year's Tory Party Conference, David Cameron got a good laugh referring to once having accidentally left his daughter in the pub. This year's embarrassing story might present more of a challenge for his speech-writers.
Over the past 48 hours, foreign friends have inundated me with questions on this issue, which I will seek to answer now. First, though, I think we should all spare a moment to feel for the distress and shame this rumor has caused to the family of the pig. Our thoughts and sympathies are with them at this difficult time, and our admiration for the dignified silence they have maintained.
Most common question -
Do I feel uncomfortable that my country's leader has reportedly had sex with a dead pig?
Uncomfortable? Maybe.
Surprised? No.
This is simply what happens when young people have lots of money and too much spare time. When the alleged incident occurred, Cameron was not really engaged on anything important - he was just idling his time away at Oxford studying for a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, with a long-term ambition to run the country. Surely we can all see the advantages for Cameron, and for all of us, of him breaking out of that ivory-tower environment and getting a broader, more rounded sense of how ordinary people live, by going to dinner dressed up as the concubine of a medieval English monarch and sticking his penis in a dead pig's mouth.
Also, in fairness to David Cameron, I don't think we should automatically let our opinion of him be colored by what is, as far as we know, merely a single, isolated, one-off Fucking-a-Pig-in the-Face-Incident.
Put yourself in Cameron's position: you come from generations of inherited wealth; you are a teenager with lots of libidinous energy and more money than you know what to do with, and no chance of it ever running out. You are essentially born into a rock star's lifestyle. Thrill-seeking goes with the territory. You don't even have to learn how to play a guitar first.
You've been educated at Eton, Britain's finest school, where you spent time being caned by older boys and in turn, caning younger boys and masturbating communally onto biscuits which the last one in the group to ejaculate must consume. So, from that perspective, necrophilial inter-species fellatio rape is not really debauched or disgusting, just a logical progression. The upper-class equivalent of throwing a television out of a hotel window or sexually abusing groupies with a dead shark.
It's character-building, sharing a severed pig's head for sexual pleasure with fellow future rulers of Empire. A bonding exercise. Decades later, you run into old friends in some far-flung colony, you've always got some special memories to share over the billiards and the brandy. Or you can swap a wry smile when you're both up to your ankles in happy squealing Tamworth Reds during an election photo-op on an organic farm.
Besides, let's not single Cameron out here: how do we know he is the only one? More of our Prime Ministers went to Oxford than any other university. Most of those went to Eton.
Of course it sounds disgusting, but then, who among us cannot say. "I had a few drinks one night, and one of the lads dared me to..."
And, whatever it was, you never expect your mates to split on you.
So, here's the question I would pose - which, who knows, may have already appeared on the Oxford University Final Examination Papers in Moral Philosophy -
Which is more degrading - sticking your cock in a dead pig's mouth, or being the grass who made it public?
Oh, and in answer to the second most common question I'm getting asked - yes, I'm certain he's washed it since.