In turbulent political times, stability comes with four legs, whiskers and a fondness for napping.
Larry the cat celebrates 15 years on Sunday as the British government’s official rodent-catcher and unofficial first feline, a reassuring presence who has served under six prime ministers. Sometimes it seems like they have served under him.
“Larry the cat’s approval ratings will be very high,” said Philip Howell, a Cambridge University professor who has studied the history of human-animal relations. “And prime ministers tend not to hit those numbers.
"He represents stability, and that’s at a premium."
The gray-and-white tabby’s rags-to-riches story has taken him from stray on the streets to Britain’s seat of power, 10 Downing St., where he bears the official title Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office.
Adopted from London’s Battersea Dogs and Cats Home by then-Prime Minister David Cameron, Larry entered Downing Street on Feb. 15, 2011. According to a profile on the UK government website, his duties include “greeting guests to the house, inspecting security defenses and testing antique furniture for napping quality.”
Larry roams freely and has a knack for upstaging world leaders arriving at 10 Downing St.’s famous black door, to the delight of news photographers.
“He’s great at photo-bombing,” said Justin Ng, a freelance photographer who has come to know Larry well over the years. “If there’s a foreign leader that’s about to visit then we know he’ll just come out at the exact moment that meet-and-greet is about to happen.”
Larry has met many world leaders, who sometimes have to step around or over him. It has been observed that he is largely unfriendly to men, though he took a liking to former US President Barack Obama, and he drew a smile from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on one of the Ukrainian leader’s visits to London.
When US President Donald Trump visited in 2019, Larry crashed the official doorstep photo and then took a nap under the Beast, the president’s armored car.
Reports of Larry’s rodent-catching skills vary, though he has been photographed snagging the occasional mouse — and, once, a pigeon, which escaped.
“He’s more of a lover than a fighter,” Ng said. “He’s very good at what he does: lounging around and basically showing people that he’s very nonchalant.”
Larry has cohabited, sometimes uneasily, with prime ministerial pets including Boris Johnson’s Jack Russell cross Dilyn and Rishi Sunak’s Labrador retriever Nova. He is kept well away from current Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s family cats, JoJo and Prince, who inhabit the private family quarters while Larry rules the working areas of Downing Street.
He had a volatile relationship with Palmerston, diplomatic top cat at the Foreign Office across the street from No. 10. The pair were caught tussling several times before Palmerston retired in 2020. Palmerston died this month in Bermuda, where he was serving as “feline relations consultant” to the governor.
Meanwhile, Larry abides. He is 18 or 19, and has slowed down a bit, but continues to patrol his turf and to sleep on a window ledge above a radiator just inside the No. 10 door.
He is British soft power in feline form, and woe betide any prime minister who got rid of him.
“A cat-hating PM, that seems to me to be political suicide,” said Howell.
He said Larry’s status as nonpartisan “official pet” sets him apart from the American presidential pets – most often dogs – that US leaders have sometimes deployed to soften their image.
“The fact that cats are less tractable is part of the charm, too,” Howell said. “He’s sort of whimsically not partisan in a political sense, but he tends to take to some people and not to others and he won’t necessarily sit where you want him to sit and pose where you want him to pose.
“There is a certain kind of unruliness about Larry which I think would endear him, certainly, to Brits.”
