jokes and puns littered Twitter following the first day of the Daily Mail’s serialisation of Lord Ashcroft’s unauthorised biography of David Cameron.
Beyond the schoolboy humour however, some newspapers asked serious questions about one of allegations in Call Me Dave, the book co-authored by Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott. When did Cameron know about Ashcroft’s non-dom status?
The Mirror
ran an editorial on the matter arguing that if Cameron had misled voters it amounted to “a grave offence”. It called on the prime minister to “answer the allegations.”
But there was something of a circling of the wagons around Cameron among three more sympathetic papers. The Times questioned the book’s credibility, as its front page headline implied, “
Cameron biography claims start to unravel.”
The Daily Express confined coverage to a page 4 lead, “Cameron’s student prank claim ‘nonsense’ say friends”. And the Daily Telegraph also downplayed the story.
The Sun, by contrast, went on the offensive with a front page exclusive “
PM at coke party” that relied on claims by “a source” who was said to have “attended the 2011 party.”
But all eyes, naturally enough, were on the second instalment of the Mail’s serialisation, and the paper certainly didn’t hang back with seven more pages tagged “Cameron confidential” and more lurid allegations.
Its front page story, “
PM savaged by top brass”, claimed that Richards once told Cameron “that ‘being in the Combined Cadet Force at Eton’ did not qualify him to decide the tactics of complex military operations.”
It said the biography raised “hugely disturbing questions about the prime minister’s approach to military action” and exposed his clashes with senior army figures and the White House over strategy in Libya and Syria.
Oddly, the Mail has made less of Cameron’s alleged participation in a pig ritual in order to join the Piers Gaveston society while at Oxford university than its tabloid rivals.
“Whatever the facts of this bizarre allegation, we already knew that Mr Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson were rich, spoiled, braying brats while undergraduates.
We have long known that their life experiences are far removed from the British people, and that they have little instinctive understanding of the plight of the poor.”
It is clear, when the media and Ashcroft move on, that the pig business will linger. Oakeshott, when appearing on BBC2’s Newsnight, was less than convincing when interviewed about the story’s single source.
She pointed out that it was but a brief mention in a 200,000-word book. But it will surely be the enduring image of this farcical political episode.
