'The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, " George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, "but already it was impossible to say which was which." Irresistible – Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore, dipping her toe gently into the deep, deep well of Ashcroft-Cameron jokes which will ensure this story runs and runs. No matter how truthful, how unbelievable, or how many times it is denied. It's probably most unfair on the British prime minister, but that's the brutal way politics is.
Usually, they say, it's the slighted woman who should be most feared. Now perhaps the slighted political associate . Lord Ashcroft, it appears , millionaire Tory donor and one-time key party adviser and official, thought he had a call on a cabinet post in David Cameron's government but was sidelined as controversy raged over his "non-dom" tax status (the fact that he could avoid paying UK tax on his worldwide income).
In revenge – though, most disingenuously, he denies it – the peer, along with former Sunday Times political editor, Isabel Oakeshott, has produced a biography of the PM, Call Me Dave, which was serialised this week in the Daily Mail.
Its most sensational claim – based on a single source, an anonymous MP – is that, as a student, Canmeron performed a mock sex act with a dead pig’s head as part of an initiation into one of Oxford’s most elitist student dining clubs. It also alleges , not for the first time, that he smoked pot, a claim that has not exactly been denied by Downing Street, but which these days would normally hardly bear mention.
Much more politically damaging, however, is Ashcroft’s insistance that Cameron knew much earlier than he has publicly admitted about the former’s tax avoidance – well before an election in which it would become an issue. The issue plays to the sense that many have that the prime minister is less squeaky clean than his handlers would wish us to believe, and has manifested again a potentially fatal propensity to stick loyally by dodgy aides and advisers long past their sell-by date.