The Pirate Bay claimed on Monday that Swedish police never laid hands on the servers behind the filesharing site in a raid last December, despite the fact the website went down for two months.
The raid on Nacka datacentre near Stockholm in Sweden mostly hit EZTV, a website dedicated to television show torrents, according to former EZTV staff member Sladinki007, who confirmed that site’s hardware had been taken by the cops.
Whilst a server from the Pirate Bay was taken by police in December, this had actually been hosted at a different location, and was used to run a communication channel for the website’s admins, according to a Pirate Bay staffer that spoke to TorrentFreak, a filesharing blog.
Following the raid a Pirate Bay moderator was arrested by the police, prompting the website to stop operations as a precaution, which gave the impression the site had been hit in the raid.
According to the source the team was not sure if it was the main target of the raid, with the servers behind the main website actually being located outside of Sweden.
However they did not completely dismiss the chance the police had been following an erroneous lead.
The Pirate Bay eventually reappeared in February of this year with all of its data intact, a relaunch having been delayed so the site’s admins could move and adjust to a new “cloud” environment, which lets admins interface with the hosting system remotely.
Since that time the website had apparently kept various moderators and observers ignorant of the facts behind the raid so they could investigate any potential compromising of their systems and team.
Following close behind is this novel interpretation of the Katy Perry classic “I Kissed a Girl”, an ode to bestiality that should have Westminster swine running for the hills:
In the annals of Tory sleaze few allegations have matched the claim that prime minister David Cameron inserted his penis into the mouth of a dead pig as part of an initiation ceremony at an obscure club in Oxford University.
The claim has sent Fleet Street into paroxysms of joy, confirming most of what people want to believe about the poshness of Call Me Dave – incidentally the title of the biography from which this charge originates – as well as the cloistered perversions of the Oxbridge elite.
Currently being serialised in the Daily Mail, Call Me Dave is the work of Tory peer and pollster Michael Ashcroft and former Sunday Times political editor Isabel Oakeshott. The, er, porking passage in question goes as follows:
“But Cameron went a great deal further. He also got involved in the notorious Oxford dining society, the Piers Gaveston, named after the lover of Edward II, which specialises in bizarre rituals and sexual excess.
“A distinguished Oxford contemporary claims Cameron once took part in an outrageous initiation ceremony at a Piers Gaveston event, involving a dead pig. His extraordinary suggestion is that the future PM inserted a private part of his anatomy into the animal’s mouth.
“The source — himself an MP — first made the allegation out of the blue at a business dinner in June 2014. Lowering his voice, he claimed to have seen photographic evidence of this disgusting ritual.”
Some months later this same MP is said to have provided the name of the photograph’s owner and the picture’s dimensions, as well as adding that the pig’s head had been in the lap of a Piers Gaveston member at the time. Ashcroft and Oakeshott approached the owner of the photo for confirmation, without success.
That appears to be the sum of the evidence in the public domain that Cameron may have giving the swine a taste of his wiener. Speaking to Channel 4, Oakeshott distances herself from the claim by saying it was not reported as a confirmed fact, but merely as an allegation that readers could take or leave.
By any standard this is a dodge from Oakeshott, who knows her pedigree and the claimed credibility of her source, as well as the reverse snobbery among much of the public, would lead many to conclude that it was more likely true than not.
More convincing is Oakeshott’s defence that the tale is but a few paragraphs in a 200,000 word book, though it is hard to believe that she did not anticipate the story sparking headlines in Fleet Street when it was included in the Daily Mail extract.
Cameron’s confirmed membership of the Bullingdon Club, an Oxford society for the posh once frequented by London mayor Boris Johnson and chancellor George Osborne, does support the idea he might have been part of Piers Gaveston, as does the fact that as a distant relative of the Windsors Cameron is certainly privileged enough to be a candidate for such societies.
Lurid stories of university club initiations have also regularly appeared in the press over the last few years, some involving intense drinking, odd sexual practices or the playing of a game of rugby in Edinburgh with a live chicken used in place of a ball. Molesting dead swine is therefore not that farfetched as an entry requirement.
Despite this the allegation that Ashcroft is publishing this after he was snubbed by the offer of a lowly position in Cameron’s government has damaged the credibility of the claims. In an extract from the book, Ashcroft wrote:
“After putting my neck on the line for nearly 10 years – both as party treasurer under [former Tory leader] William Hague and as deputy chairman – and after ploughing some £8m into the party, I regarded this as a declinable offer. It would have been better had Cameron offered me nothing at all.”
Without a second photograph or a second source – unlikely, given the secretive nature of such clubs – it will also be hard to confirm the piggate story. Whether it even matters, given the fact most prime ministers have probably done stupid, obscene things throughout (and after) their youths should be enough to bore Fleet Street before too long.
The Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron revealed he has been in conversation with a number of Labour luminaries following the elevation of hard left MP Jeremy Corbyn to the head of the party.
Over last weekend Farron had apparently fielded calls from a number of leading Labourites, perhaps including frontbench MPs, in discussions that made him feel like an “agony aunt”.
“I’ve had various unsolicited texts, some of them over the weekend, where I felt like I was being an agony aunt rather than anything else. People who have been members of the [Labour] party for as long as I’ve been a member of mine who feel that they don’t recognise their party anyone and feel deeply distressed.”
He added:
“The bottom line is…people in the Labour Party need to understand they can have conversations with me, which may or may not be conclusive, which will remain totally between me and them.”
This is despite the party’s destructive general election that left the party with a mere eight MPs, with many progressives dismayed abandoning the party over its support for university tuition fees, and some even branding the Liberals “Yellow Tories”.
Although Farron’s comments hint at potential defections, in another interview this week he was reluctant to discuss defections or a potential Labour split reminiscent of that which created the Social Democratic Party, which saw four leading figures from Labour peel off into a more centrist unit.
Farron told BuzzFeed that it was “far too soon” to discuss such a split, adding on the subject of potential defections: “That’s not something I’m wanting to talk about particularly, that’s an internal matter for them.”
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is proving to be widely distrusted among the British electorate on almost all political issues except the National Health Service (NHS).
A survey from the pollster YouGov showed that the North Islington MP was not trusted to take “the right decisions” on issues including government spending, taxes, migration, the EU, economics, terrorism and defence.
Labour voters were also shown by the poll as being out of step with the rest of the country in their expectations for their new leader, forecasting a stronger leadership from Corbyn and better chances of him winning the next general election in 2020 than the general population.
The findings follow Corbyn’s first appearance as leader at prime minister’s questions (PMQs) that received a mixed response from pundits and those on social media after the MP decided to read out questions crowdsourced from his supporters.
Whilst some approved of the greater solemnity that the Labour leader had brought to the weekly interrogation of David Cameron, others argued that Corbyn did not scrutinise the prime minister’s answers closely enough.
The poll adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that Corbyn will not be able to win a general election, many political scientists having concluded that the May election was largely won on the basis of which party was believed to have the better leader and greater economic competence, according to Britain Votes 2015.
Full survey results from YouGov can be viewed here.
