Every now and again, you encounter a sight so magnificently idiotic that it flies into your head, ricochets off the side of your brain and is reflexively pinballed straight back out into the universe, leaving you wondering whether you hallucinated the whole thing.

And so it was that I found myself queuing at one of those self-service kiosks in McDonalds recently, watching, dumbfounded, as the human cat in front of me scoured the board for a McWhiskas before dejectedly slumming it with a fillet-o-fish. Initially, I wasn’t sure why she’d ventured out for takeaway wearing pointy ears, a fluffy tail, whiskers and strategically placed patches on her feline parts, but as it turned out, she identified as a furry. (Read: part of a subculture of people who live as self-created animal characters – in this case a cat – albeit one that answered her mobile “hello” instead of the more conventional “miaow” when it rang while she waited for her order.)

Personally, I have traditionally identified as a person who has no use for actual cats, much less those that walk on two legs and require their thickshakes be served in a saucer. But on reflection, I’ve decided the McMoggy might’ve actually been onto something. How else do you explain a sudden willingness to climb into the psyche of an English cat named Larry, better known as the 18-year-old mouser and pet-in-chief at the British prime minister’s Downing Street residence? The one-time stray tabby, adopted from a shelter in 2007 and brought in to deal with a rodent problem, has now also seen off five government leaders, prompting one media outlet to describe him in June as “the one figure of stability in the last 14 years of turmoil in the UK”.

It was a generous assessment, given the sheer number of times Larry has been photographed terrorising other animals, including his fellow cats, a pigeon and, on one notable occasion, a fox much larger than himself. As political animals go, he sounds all right so far, but “figure of stability”? OK, let’s go with that.

It’s impossible to say what’s driving Larry’s animus, but presumably the revolving door of Downing Street tenants hasn’t helped matters. Like all his mouser predecessors (and there have been cats fulfilling that function since at least 1929 – you’d think someone would just bite the bullet and call an exterminator), Larry technically belongs to the residence’s staff, not the prime minister. That means whoever wins the top job temporarily inherits the cat. Which brings us, finally, to newly installed British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who this week took time out from the nation’s ongoing issues with hospital performance, a prolonged crisis in living standards and the knock-on effects of the war in Ukraine to announce he’d bought his kids their own cat.

It turned out there was a catch, though. (Of course there was a catch. Dad didn’t get the top job without figuring out how to finesse the fine print.) Evidently, the Starmers already have a family cat called Jojo, and as such, the promised new pet was supposed to be a dog. Leave it to a politician to be confronted with a problem (they told the kids they could have a German shepherd!), backpedal furiously (or, as Starmer would have it, enter into “long negotiations”), and emerge, triumphant, wielding a Siberian kitten named Prince.

Loading

This seems like a punk move on two fronts: one, a cat is most assuredly not a dog, and two, it’s being shipped into Downing Street where the resident cat, Larry, has already got the Starmers’ original cat and four new human tenant-owners to break in. Then there’s the question of his own political fortunes: an experiment conducted in 2014 revealed that British voters’ feelings towards the ageing mouser were dictated by their personal politics. In short, Larry is currently enjoying a resurgence in popularity among Labour voters, who didn’t like him prior to the British election on July 5, while Conservatives who liked him when Rishi Sunak was in power now feel like turning the hose on him. When the leadership changes again, the reverse will apply.