PigGate

2015scandal / viral hashtagclassic

Published September 22, 2026

PigGate, also known as Hameron or The Bae of Pigs, is the September 2015 scandal that erupted when an unauthorized biography of British Prime Minister David Cameron claimed he had put his genitals in a dead pig's mouth during an Oxford society initiation2. Within a day the hashtag was tweeted more than 178,000 times, setting off a wave of pig puns, Peppa Pig jokes and Black Mirror comparisons that dominated UK Twitter that week3.

political satire memesbritish memesscandal memeshashtag memespun memes

Overview

The joke universe around PigGate / Hameron ran almost entirely on wordplay and old photo callbacks. British Twitter users pulled every pig idiom they could think of into service, from "pulled pork" and "pork barrel politics" to "telling porkies," the Cockney slang for lies1. Farm visit photos of Cameron cradling piglets or leaning close to sows got recirculated with fresh, knowing captions1.

A parallel joke thread linked the story to Black Mirror's 2011 pilot "The National Anthem," in which a fictional British prime minister is coerced into performing a sex act with a pig on live television2. Show creator Charlie Brooker said publicly that he had no advance knowledge of the Ashcroft allegation and that the coincidence weirded him out1. Peppa Pig gags, Babe references and "David Hameron" puns filled out the rest of the pile-on2.

Origin & Background

Platform
The Daily Mail (news scoop) / Twitter (viral spread)
Date
2015

On September 20, 2015, The Daily Mail ran a serialized excerpt from Call Me Dave, an unauthorized biography of David Cameron by Conservative peer Lord Michael Ashcroft and journalist Isabel Oakeshott2. An unnamed Oxford classmate told Ashcroft that Cameron had inserted "a private part of his anatomy" into the mouth of a dead pig during an initiation for the Piers Gaveston Society, a secretive Oxford dining club known for heavy drug use and sexual parties3. The book acknowledged the story could not be fully verified but said the source had supplied corroborating detail, including the physical dimensions of a claimed photograph held by another classmate3. Cameron's staff declined to comment when asked about the allegation3.

How It Spread

The hashtag actually predated the story. Twitter user gjb70 coined #Piggate ahead of the Mail's publication, working from advance rumors about what the excerpt contained3. Within 24 hours of the story going live, the tag had been tweeted more than 178,000 times, and a parody account called @CameronPig, written from the pig's perspective, picked up over 10,000 followers3.

UK press coverage moved fast. The Guardian and The Independent both ran explainers, while the BBC's initial decision not to report the pig allegation drew criticism from viewers who read it as deference to Downing Street3. In the US, Gawker and BuzzFeed rounded up the best jokes, with BuzzFeed's Tom Phillips opening his roundup by warning readers, "You'll never look at the phrase 'pulled pork' the same way again"1.

The Black Mirror callback did as much work as any single tweet. Charlie Brooker's four-year-old pilot about a PM and a pig went from cult sci-fi to lived reality overnight, and the shorthand "life imitating Black Mirror" attached itself to PigGate for years afterward2.

How to Use This Meme

PigGate posts typically pair a straight-faced photo of Cameron near a pig or piglet with a pun that treats the allegation as fact. Common conventions include swapping his surname for "Hameron," stacking pork idioms ("telling porkies," "pork barrel") into fake Question Time exchanges, and dropping a Black Mirror still under any Peppa Pig screenshot1.

Frequently Asked Questions