Labour’s new cat strategy is not real at all

Emily Sheffield, The Independent

As we wake up this morning to the news that Rachel Reeves will be adding a fourth cat to Downing Street — alongside Keir Starmer’s new Siberian kitten and their rescue cat, JoJo — it’s tempting to think this story is now more about dead cats than live ones. And by that, I mean the famous political strategy first coined by the strategist Lynton Crosby (who helped secure David Cameron his 2015 election win). For those not familiar with this theory, it’s where political strategists purposefully divert media attention away from one problem, by chucking in another, less damaging, one. Crosby, an Australian, was rumoured to have prosaically described his method thus: “Everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!”’ (In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat — the thing you want them to talk about — and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.)

Admittedly, it normally requires the dead cat story to have shock value. And I’m not sure the new feline residents of No 10, however unwelcome their presence is to Larry — the current resident Downing Street cat — quite have the headline-grabbing power to divert from the government’s current troubles. There’s no denying the doomerism effect Starmer’s rose garden speech has had on the nation, crushing our end-of-summer vibes and causing his personal ratings to dive. There’s the cronyism row, the “pain” Reeves is busy planning to deliver to us all at the end of this month with her Budget — and Labour’s bullish, naive insistence that absolutely everything is the fault of the Tories.

Our new foreign secretary, David Lammy, announced the UK is suspending some arms sales to Israel on the day Israel confronted the horror of six hostages brutally executed by Hamas. America has now publicly rebuked the UK’s take, with a leak claiming they privately warned the British government against suspending arms sales in case it damaged ceasefire negotiations. What this proves is that live cats — even when they include a cute, fluffy Siberian kitten — are not going to be effective “dead cats”, this week. That’s not to say that these kitten announcements have not been carefully added to the political news grid by Starmer’s comms team in No 10. It was no coincidence that on Monday morning, after a torrid weekend of headlines, there’s our new prime minister all warm and cosy on BBC Radio 5 Live, talking up the deliberations within his family on whether it was going to be a German shepherd puppy or a kitten.

“There’s been a long summer of negotiations, back and forth, different options... I said we’d get in the room and sort it out — we are now getting a kitten instead of a dog,” he joked. It’s heartwarming stuff, with a nice hint of humour. We are a nation of animal lovers, after all — the UK was the first country in the world to start an animal welfare charity in 1824 — and woe betide any political leader who admits they don’t like dogs or cats (cue: political suicide). You will be seen as “weird” if you profess a heart of stone when it comes to pets — to coin Tim Walz and his extremely effective anti-Trump campaign. Remember the cautionary tale of Trump’s VP contender Kristi Noem and her fall from grace four months ago? The South Dakota governor wrote in her memoir, unwisely as it turned out, how she killed her own dog. Then, as America exploded in horror, she doubled down defending her actions. Noem was soon a national pariah — and her Whitehouse ambitions met the same bloody end as her dog.

So, Starmer sounding all cute (but also manly) on pets is no minor personality detail. He did omit how much the kitten would cost — when you’re cutting fuel payments to pensioners, you don’t want to admit Siberian kittens set you back £1,000. Instead, our PM focused on the dilemma of where the cat flap will go, given the high-security door to the No 11 flat... (the reason why Larry, the much-loved Cameron kitten when they arrived in 2010, ended up living downstairs, terrorising mice and charming visitors). At my last visit into Downing Street, this June, there was Larry, now an elder statesman at 17, on the windowsill to the right of the shiny black door. He was in his basket, asleep, oblivious to the election turmoil within. I snapped a picture of him and sent it to our family WhatsApp. He’s become a political celebrity this last decade and is everything you want in a cat: calming to stroke in times of high stress, cooly oblivious to needy politicians, or banks of photographers — and a fantastic mouser.

To date, there are no extra details on the kitten the Reeves family are taking on for their children. Perhaps we will get a few cute pictures of the assorted felines wandering No 10 before the Budget? I, for one, am all for amusing divergences from our financial woes — bring on the fluff. In the absence of any sunny uplands by Starmer, the adventures of new four-legged friends will have to do (though I’m secretly hoping Larry is going to take them all on). There might, however, be a more subtle cat message going on beneath the surface — that of cats being the new pet of choice for centrist, left-leaning politicians. Boris Johnson, George Osborne, Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt had dogs.

And across the Atlantic, JD Vance, Trump’s running mate has spectacularly alienated half of America’s female population after resurfaced comments from 2021 show him claiming that Democratic politicians were a “bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives”. With every attempt to dig himself out this summer, Vance has instead dug in deeper. If you’re trying to get all touchy-feely with the nation and show off your feminist credentials, then maybe getting a German Shepherd dog was just deemed too butch, too Republican, too Conservative. Much better to show alignment with the Democrat candidate. And, if Kamala Harris does win in November, will we be living in a new cross-Atlantic feline-focused era? Complete with comedy pictures of cats in the White House? Just one warning for Starmer and Reeves: yes, 41 per cent of British pet owners have cats, but 65 per cent still prefer dogs.