AMERICAN comedian Bill Maher has described the tendency to try to score points against a political opponent by digging up sordid or embarrassing details from their past as a kind of “gotcha”. Maher was writing, back in 2005, about claims of “youthful indiscretions” by George W Bush, but our appetite for the "gotcha" appears as intense now as then. In the United States earlier this year, Republicans thought they’d found gotcha treasure in the form of an essay written by Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders back in 1972. Sanders' description, in the article, Man And Woman, of a woman having a fantasy of a gang rape, was instantly pitched as a rape apologia, and evidence of his misogyny. Gotcha, as it were. And, here in the UK, Lord Ashcroft has delivered a whole torrent of gotchas in the form of Call Me Dave, a biography of our own Prime Minister, with more than a few embarrassing allegations. Not least of them was the one about the hog, or "Piggate": the claim that Cameron may, according to an unnamed source, have taken part in an initiation ceremony involving the insertion of his penis into a dead pig’s mouth. Gotcha.

Most of us have done, said or written something in our hazy, distant pasts that we would rather not have unearthed and presented to the wider public. Chances are it doesn’t involve a pig or asking a KGB agent for some drugs (also a Call Me Dave claim), as most of us are not part of that special club of the elite. But we all have regrets.

“Trying to define a person’s current self by their past self is the worst sense of gotcha,” Maher wrote in 2005. “Our mistakes from the past are just that – mistakes – and most of the time it was necessary to make them in order to become the person we then became.” I, of course, agree with that. It is a narrative we all like, the one in which personal change is possible and redeeming. But the problem arises when we don’t like what the person is, does, or says now – and we feel that perhaps the two are linked. It arises when we feel that the youthful bad behaviour or indiscretion says something profound about that person's current mindset or actions.

So on some level, as is testified by last week’s Twitter storm, whether it’s true or not, Piggate does matter. It matters because a great many people think that if it were true, Cameron’s youthful involvement in the kind of club that got involved in sordid rituals, would say something about his current character. Piggate was, for many of us, a lurid reminder of one of the big issues around Cameron: his class, his Eton and Oxford education, his membership of “the club”: and by that I mean not exactly the Bullingdon or the Piers Gaveston, but the larger, tight-knit and influential one of which those are manifestations. It reminded us of the ways he might be favouring that club.

But we didn’t need Piggate to tell us this. We didn’t really even need Call Me Dave. We already have a strong impression of the kind of youth Cameron would have had. We knew he'd been a member of Oxford's Bullingdon club, which was rumoured to have required new members to burn a £50 note in front of a homeless person: a rite I find more deeply upsetting than the one currently making headlines, since it involves suppression of empathy, rather than just the mere willingness to debase oneself in the name of bonding.

Still, I feel uncomfortable with the "gotcha". People change. Sometimes they do some penance. Sometimes they no longer even really relate to or understand their former selves. Forty-three years, in Bernie Sanders’ case, is a long slog. We can expect a person to have altered a great deal in that time. The world and its values have evolved hugely over that period. How we speak about rape and consent has been dramatically affected by feminism. But also, even given all that, what he wrote, which is easily findable online, was more embarrassing than bad. We need to be able to talk about those women who do have rape fantasies (and some do) without making the acknowledgement of their existence a kind of victim-blaming.

Sanders is not a misogynist. That much seems clear from his current politics. The "gotcha" therefore didn’t work. Cameron, however, is a member of the elite club. He remains that. And while he is fulfilling his destiny by being in power, by forming a political team with fellow former Bullingdon member, George Osborne, he can never escape that. He seems still entrenched. And that’s what matters. Not the past; but what he is now. And did we really need a "gotcha" to tell us that?