Primus Porcus

One cold bright day in April, Margaret looked out onto her farm and saw the future in her pigs.

Not ham nor bacon for them, she vowed, but something more befitting the fancy French names she’d given them in the little French she misunderstood.

There went Hautain, the thinnest and snootiest of the lot, his snout turned up against the world. And in the shadows on the other side of the pig pen, Malin, the slyest of all her pigs. And finally, Gaufre, the roundest and stupidest of the lot, who at that moment had his snout buried deep in the trough. A pig more at home in filth Margaret had never seen, and she’d farmed pigs for nearly forty years.

“Gaufre, my boy, I intend to make something from you, and not just the better part of a full English breakfast. That goes for all of you.”

The pigs, in their sty, squealed in delight.

“To the city, and I along with you,” Margaret said.

Hautain trotted about the sty as prim and proper as a trained Andalusian horse.

Malin’s lips twisted on one side into a grin as sly as any fox had ever owned.

Gaufre evacuated his bowels, then promptly rolled over in his own muck.

“Good boy,” Margaret said. “Keep it up.”

#

“Ludicrous. A pig? Who’d vote for a pig?” The party leader hadn’t questioned the notion of three pigs snuffling around his office, but he balked at the idea of one as a member of Parliament.

“Everybody,” she said.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Dress him in a suit, put a tie on him, and Gaufre will make a fine candidate.”

The party leader leaned to the side of his desk, where Gaufre had his snout deep into a wastebasket.

“This one?” he asked.

“Gaufre, yes”

“Why not one of the other two?”

“Only Gaufre can lead you to victory.”

The party leader squinted to find something special in the fat little piggy beside him. “How so?”

Margaret patted Hautain on the head. “This one’s snout is too high in the air. People don’t like that. And Malin has too much of a smile about him. People don’t much like a smile.” She nodded at Malin, who smiled smugly in return. “But Gaufre is an everypig.”

“A what?”

“An everypig. The voters will see in him their own piggishness and feel better about themselves. There goes a pig I can trust, for he is a pig just like me, they will think.”

“They will?” The party leader eyed the fat little pig with suspicion.

He saw nothing of himself in Gaufre, until the pig lifted its snout from the basket. It was dusted in white sugar from a cake wrapping the party leader had tossed there only a minute before the strange meeting.

The party leader giggled. “I do like cake. One too many slices, or so my wife says.”

“You see?” Margaret said. “Whatever muck he rolls in, the public will have rolled in similar at one time or another. They’ll love him.”

“They will? You’re sure of that?”

“Oh, most surely. Every one of them is a pig at heart, wanting nothing more than to stick their snout into the trough. They don’t because it’s not the done thing.”

“I don’t know,” the party leader said with all the conviction he usually summoned when refusing a second slice of Battenberg. “It’s an awfully big risk to take.”

“Give Gaufre here a month, six weeks at the most in the public eye, and I’ll bet you a pound to a penny he’ll poll more favourably than the last dozen of your candidates.”

The party leader licked his lips as though the second slice of Battenburg was about to be consumed.

“I suppose we might play it off as some jape if it goes wrong.”

“It won’t,” Margaret said, with all the confidence of one who’d farmed for forty years and knew their way around a pig or three.

“I’m not going to regret this, am I?”

“What’s to regret?”

The party leader eyed the pig, and the pig eyed the party leader. Both sets of eyes were tiny.

“Let’s hope nothing.” The party leader offered a hand. “It’s madness, but I suppose no different than any other madness we’ve indulged before. You have an agreement.”

Margaret shook the hand.

“Here’s to the future,” she said, and all the pigs in the room oinked in appreciation.

#

Lord Munty resembled a red balloon wrapped in a pinque hunting coat and jodhpurs. On a crisp Boxing Day not long after the pigs met the party leader, he toppled off his horse and the balloon went pop!

A little later, his seat in the village of Little Huff, became the focus of a by-election.

The usual candidates showed. A young woman wearing a yellow rosette promising a little, but not much change. An older man in a red rosette who promised more, but not much more. A thin man in green who arrived on a bicycle and promised even more than the yellow and the red. And a madman in a madman’s hat who, year by year, had started to sound less and less mad. And then there was Gaufre.

Dressed in a suit that didn’t quite fit, with a tie tied not too well, Gaufre did the rounds of the village. And at each door he met the same questions and gave the same answers.

“What about the refugees?”

Oink.

“And our borders?”

Oink.

“And our jobs?”

Oink.

“And the army? What of the army, and the navy, and the air force, and our boys and girls in blue?

Oink, Gaufre said, and the people in their cottages heard all they wanted to hear.

Gaufre won with a majority of eight hundred, and for a victory speech he rolled in muck before the excited villagers and oinked an oink that was all they’d ever wanted to hear before.

“He’s just like us. He has our best interests at heart,” they said, in one way or another.

And Margaret clapped and said to the party leader, “See? What did I tell you?”

#

Gaufre’s rise to power was as swift as a lie to a politician’s lips.

He soon became the darling foil of topical comedy shows, where the panellists traded their better judgements for easy laughs.

He appeared in TV jungles and ate grubs much better than any of the rest.

He wrote a column for The Daily Mail, Deals With It. One thousand words a week, and all of them ‘oink’.

It was nearly enough, but not quite enough

“The village is a good start, but we must push on. We need something more,” Margaret said.

“Such as?” the party leader asked.

The something more was a tiny bicycle upon which Gaufre rode from the village and directly into a mayor’s role in the city.

“Incredible,” the party leader remarked to Margaret, as Gaufre made his acceptance speech. “I’d never have believed it, if I didn’t see it with my own two eyes.”

“Told you so,” Margaret said.

“Oink,” said Gaufre, and licked his own testicles.

The round of applause that followed was deafening.

#

It didn’t take long for the city to tire of Gaufre’s leadership.

During his short reign, he’d oinked his approval on a multi-million-pound dream trough filled with slop, which never appeared. He proposed a third runway at Heathrow, filled with mud, and a giant water cannon to make that mud, but not a drop of water ever spilled. He promised the abolition of straw houses and the building of wolf-proof brick homes, but not a brick settled on mortar, and the huffing and puffing continued without pause.

Margaret, knowing bad news spread more quickly than muck, sprang into action and suggested Gaufre would make a better prime minister than mayor.

The party leader looked at her with suspicion.

“A pig as prime minister is preposterous,” he said, but he didn’t believe even half of his own words, so he added another. “But…”

The party had for several months played a game of musical chairs with their leaders; a new one taking the seat of power shortly after the sounds of the last scandal had stopped. The latest, Tiz Bracket, a woman as grey as thrice-steeped tea, warned her fellow ministers of the folly of a pig in power as the leadership challenge commenced.

“I implore you, my right-honourable colleagues, a pig in parliament would only turn this place into a barnyard. It would make a mockery of everything we stand for,” she said.

Unfortunately for Bracket, parliament spent most of its time sitting, and sometimes lounging. Within a week she was gone, and Gaufre became the new prime minister.

Outside of Number 10, Gaufre climbed a set of steps up to the lectern and gave his inaugural speech.

Oink, he said, and oink again.

Then he shat all over the steps he’d climbed.

The reporters ignored the shit and focused instead on how funny it was that a pig was prime minister, while across the land, in thought and in speech, people said, in one way or another, “He’s just like me.”

#

Tiz Bracket’s prophecy became all too quickly true.

Gaufre’s first order of business was to make parliament more of a barnyard than any, even the laziest of political cartoonists, could have imagined. With an oink or two, and the full support of a backbench who would no more rebel than a prince would sweat, Gaufre proposed the Faecal Matters Act, and now every minister would shit where they sat, and sit where they shat. By law.

The opposition, seeing the popularity of the barnyard, searched for an animal of their own. First, they chose a lamb, but slaughtered it when they became frustrated with its bleating. Then, a cow, but it was too slow and ungainly, and was far too big to fit on the front bench. Finally, amongst the chickens, they stumbled upon a cock.

Keeve was a preening, clucking, Maran cockerel, with the odd affliction of crowing long after dawn had broken.

The people, watching, said of both, “They’re just like me.”

The barnyard grew as flocks of sheep and chickens filled the back benches. Soon, a honking goose replaced The Speaker of the House, and goats filled the division lobbies, chewing up ayes and nays like fresh straw. A sneak of weasels made a permanent den beneath the dispatch box, and there were rumours of ducks roaming the Commons offices.

“Beautiful,” Margaret said, as she looked down from the viewing gallery, and saw the muck in which her little pigs flourished.

The future was a muddy wallow.

Then someone put a foot in their mouth.

#

Which foot found which mouth first, none could discern, but many believed Gaufre dragged his trotters in response.

The prime pig appeared on television nightly, standing behind a slogan he could not fully explain: HOOVES. SNOUTS. FLOUTS. But it was too late, and across the country, people, sickened with a new disease, and not as sure about anything anymore, asked, “He’s just like us, isn’t he?”

Margaret, sensing a turn in the tide, tried to beat back the waves.

“A new litter,” she proposed. “People love piglets.”

She bought a breeding sow and breed the sow did. Ten fat piglets, all which Gaufre took pictures with, then ignored, but the public had lost their appetite for pig, and started to ask, “He’s not like us, is he?”

As all good farmers knew there was a time to sow and a time to reap. A time to fatten, and a time to butcher.

It was time.

“You’re serious?” the party leader asked.

Margaret sharpened a cleaver on a leather strap. “If thine own hand offends,” she said.

“The public won’t stand for it.”

The cleaver glinted. “They’ll cheer it on.”

“How can you be so certain?”

“There’s only one thing they love more than the muck.”

“What’s that?”

Margaret plucked a hair from her head and ran it across the silvered edge of the cleaver, where it split in two. “A sacrificial lamb.”

“But he’s a pig!”

“As long as he squeals, they won’t care.”

“You’re sure of this?”

“Chop-chop,” she said.

#

Margaret lay Gaufre out on the butcher’s block and cut him hock to rib, ham to loin. She tossed trotter and jowl, bacon, and picnic into the baying crowd. And when it was all said and done, the people, greased with pig fat said, in one way or another, “He wasn’t one of us.”

Copyright © 2025 Paul John Lyon.