There is, reportedly, an official plan in place for the demise of Larry the Downing Street Cat, aka the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. Old Larry, originally acquired by the Camerons in the early part of the coalition, has now reached the impressive age of 17, having been born in the dog days of the Blair government. Sir Keir is the sixth Prime Minister to have passed through the black door of No. 10 since Larry began his tenure.
What exactly will happen when Larry shuffles off to pounce on balls of angelic wool for all eternity has not been revealed. Some wag has apparently dubbed the alleged plan ‘Larry Bridge’, a reference to the ‘London Bridge’ scheme that set out the arrangements for the funeral of the late Queen. Presumably we can be reasonably confident that Britain’s senior feline will not lie in state at Westminster Hall, with an honour guard of other prominent cats, or be granted a funeral procession through London, with a miniature coffin topped by his collar, his favourite food bowl and his famous Union Jack bowtie.
Perhaps the Prime Minister will take a break from devising new and exciting ways to crash his approval rating to address the nation from behind the Downing Street podium. Maybe BBC newsreaders will be issued with black ties – or Union Jack bowties – so that the viewing public understand something momentous has occurred. Either way, I’m sure both the national broadcaster and the political establishment will strike the right tone.
I jest, of course. But there is an important point here. It would be astonishing if it is true that there is any official contingency planning for the death of a cat, even a venerable one with a mildly charming life story who has free rein in the corridors of power, and has done sterling service keeping down the pests of Whitehall (insert your joke about interfering bureaucrats here). It would also be further evidence of a peculiar and unwelcome change in British public life.
I refer to what you might call tweeification, the increasing prominence of a laboured and self-conscious whimsicality. You can imagine some civil servant chuckling away to himself as he writes out a media strategy for the day after Larry goes into the uttermost West. We are so unconventional and zany, he insists to his colleagues – what a refreshing change from the stuffy and hidebound bad old days!
It will not be a sad or significant day for the country when Larry The Cat dies
Conceivably I am simply an old grouch, but it does not promote the dignity of the state when, for example, the Cabinet Office’s Twitter account exchanges agonising laboured banter with the US Embassy in London about the best way to make tea (this actually happened in January this year). Along similar lines, it is truly painful when the social media accounts of British embassies in countries we are playing at football indulge in forced humour about the match with the accounts of the opposing country’s government. The Platinum Jubilee was bad for this stuff: Paddington and a motorised cake and drone corgis. The past decade or so has seen the unstoppable rise of Keep Calm And Carry On, and endless jokes about A Nice Cup Of Tea In A Queue being the essence of British nationhood.
Why object to any of this, you might ask. Isn’t it just a bit of fun? The problem is that all this contrived quirkiness is used as a form of comfort blanket to avoid difficult truths about the state of the country. And not only a comfort blanket, but a weapon against those who want to have earnest discussions, to avoid trivia and irrelevancies, to treat serious things in a serious way. If everything is really a bit of a joke, and flippancy is indulged, it becomes hard to identify and discuss the truly consequential.
Politics in an advanced country involves distinguishing the genuinely weighty from the essentially trivial. It will not be a sad or significant day for the country when Larry The Cat dies, and we should not pay anyone to pretend that it will.
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