104 SURYANSU GUHA
Introduction
Having been miraculously preempted in a 2011 episode of Charlie Brooker’s
television series Black Mirror, the uncorroborated anecdote of UK Prime Minister
David Cameron’s outlandish conduct while a member of the University of Oxford’s
dining club, the Piers Gaveston Society, became a cause célèbre on social media. The
indecencies the Prime Minister allegedly performed invited a paroxysm of hashtag
frenzy and inquisitive media speculation in September 2015. However, apart from the
scandalous act of bestiality at the heart of both narratives, there are key differences. In
the episode entitled ‘The National Anthem’, the fictional Prime Minister is effectively
forced into having sexual intercourse with a pig, whereas in the anecdote Mark
Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott recount, the sexual act was voluntary and involved a
dead pig. Brooker declared in an interview in The Guardian that“[t]he first question
people were asking me was, did I know anything about it? And the answer is no,
absolutely not” (Brooker in Benedictus 2015). But the comparison is inescapable for
two reasons: the nature of the scandal itself and its impact.
Disclosing a Scandal
An oft-quoted theoretical definition of a scandal reads: “[a]media scandal occurs
when private acts that disgrace or offend the idealised, dominant morality of a social
community are made public and narrativised by the media, producing a range of
effects from ideological and cultural retrenchment to disruption and change” (Lull
and Hinnerman 1997: 3). Yet in the wake of the uncorroborated insinuations there
was little or no “cultural retrenchment to disruption and change” (Lull and Hinnerman
1997: 3), most likely because the element of disclosure was hardly available as far as
concrete evidence was concerned. Oakeshott and Ashcroft fail to even name the M.P.
who was supposedly their source, let alone provide the photographic evidence the
authors claimed to exist. The element of disclosure is widely understood to have an
integral role to play in a scandal where wrongdoings that originally took place in
secrecy, behind the public arena (Tumber and Waisbord 2004: 8) are supposed to be
disclosed. Yet in Ashcroft and Oakeshott’s account there is a mere semblance of
disclosure, an aborted attempt to disclose and the full acknowledgement of the failure
to do so. “This person [the unnamed M.P.] failed to respond to our approaches” and