Number 10’s Only Stable Resident
An exclusive interview with Larry the Cat - Britain’s longest-serving political figure, snarkiest observer, and unofficial conscience of Downing Street.
It isn’t every day that a Bear interviews a Cat to discuss the role of satire in British politics - though, to be fair, I do talk to my own fur daemon daily about all manner of things, so this felt oddly natural.
And who better to seek advice from on this subject than the country’s most famous cat?
Larry the Cat, Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, unofficial mascot of Number 10, and the long-suffering observer of more Prime Ministers than most civil servants, has seen it all. Six prime ministers, four general elections, one Brexit, a pandemic, and an international reputation as Britain’s only enduring political figure with a functioning moral compass.
But Larry’s more than just a tabby with tenure. Through the @Number10cat parody account he’s become one of the most respected satirical voices in the British political ecosystem - sharper than most columnists, clearer than the average political party, and often funnier than Have I Got News For You. In a time where the lines between truth, propaganda, and performance grow ever more blurry, Larry’s sarcastic claws tend to hit nearest home.
So what happens when you ask the internet’s favourite feline about truth, trust, humour, grief, and governing? You get insight - and quite a few paws for thought.
The Satirist-in-Chief
Larry has had a front-row seat to the greatest political farce in modern British history for years, and the view has been, shall we say, relentless. When I ask him about his approach to satire in a time of rapid political turnover and daily psychodrama, his response is both sympathetic and just a little bit devastating:
"Do you know who I really feel sorry for these days? Armando Iannucci. The man made a brilliant career out of political satire and UK politics said 'hold my beer...' - truth is stranger than fiction and there has been a never ending supply of material for over a decade now."
It's a pretty good summary of where we've ended up - when reality consistently outpaces parody, what in the world is left for satirists to do? Larry's Twitter feed has become something of a real-time documentary of this phenomenon - capturing moments when British politics becomes so absurd that mockery feels almost a bit redundant.
Take his My Way parody during the 2024 general election results:
More than 12 thousand humans like this post, not because it was particularly clever (though, of course, it was), but because it perfectly articulated what pretty much everyone in the UK was thinking watching an extended fourteen-year-long car crash finally reach its conclusion.
Or his "Hold my beer" thread from January 2023, bouncing between UK and US politics like a satirical ping-pong match:
A post that managed to sum up the last decade’s transatlantic race to the bottom in under 280 characters.
The remarkable thing about Larry isn't necessarily just his longevity - though surviving the number of Prime Ministers he has does give him a certain gravitas that quite a few of the most well-known political commentators lack. It's that he's become the constant while everything else spins. David Cameron brought him in as a pet project - by the time Keir Starmer arrived on the scene last year, Larry had become Number 10’s seemingly last functioning form of institutional memory.
In a time where ministers’ careers are counted in months and policies change at what sometimes feels like a daily rate, there is something comforting about a cat who just sits there, watches it all unfold, and periodically lets out a perfectly timed remark about the madness. He’s in no way trying to be part of the story - he’s just narrating it, one mildly sarcastic tweet at a time.
And when your political system has become indistinguishable from satire, maybe that's exactly what’s needed: a satirist who knows when to pounce and when to simply observe the chaos with the patient, slightly judgemental expression that only cats can truly master.
And in a development that would befuddle most comms consultants, this very same cat now polls better than almost anyone he tweets about. Turns out all it takes to win public trust is consistency, a bit of wit - and never being photographed at a Downing Street party.
A Cat People Actually Trust
It might be the lack of ambition. Or the honesty. Or just the whiskers. Whatever the reason, Larry’s approval rating is a pretty damning contrast to the humans he shadows. In 2024, an Ipsos poll done around the time of the General Election gave Larry a 44% favourability rating - higher than virtually every living Prime Minister, most Cabinet ministers, and a good proportion of the parliamentary Labour Party.
When I ask Larry why it is that people trust a satirical cat more than most politicians or journalists, his answer is simple:
"The Trumpification of politics isn't just about making lies commonplace, it's about making the truth indistinguishable from them. 'They're all the same' is music to the ears of politicians like Trump because it means it's working."
He's describing something we can all seen happening on what now feels like a daily basis: the deliberate erosion of a shared reality. When every action taken by a politician becomes purely performative, when every statement is spun or distorted to match an agenda and when truth becomes just another partisan position, people are bound to stop believing anyone. The rationale (if we can use that word) behind this strategy is pretty simple - if you can't convince people you're the honest one, persuade them that no one is.
But Larry occupies a different space entirely - and not just because he’s tiny and can fit into nooks and crannies we can only dream of. He's in the very privileged position of being able to make statements without filter, free from the constraints of party loyalty, career ambitions or advertising revenue. His Twitter bio doesn't need updating every time there's a reshuffle, nor does he need to moderate his criticism to secure access to politicians or worry about upsetting donors.
This freedom manifests in moments of moral clarity we can use far more of in our day to day discourse. His tweet from July this year regarding the (non) issue of Burqa bans illustrates this perfectly:
It's a succinct and forthright response to this particular culture war battle - not only rejecting the constant scapegoating we’ve been seeing play out from a particular political party / limited company, but flipping the logic being sold right around. He asks the questions we all should be asking:
Who has actually caused harm? Who has actually lied to you?
The answer, quelle surprise, isn't the people being demonised in headlines and in statements to the media with mangled statistics and three-word slogans - it's the people writing the headlines and passing the laws.
Which is why Larry's voice seems to cut through when so many others struggle to - he’s not trying to thread that needle between competing narratives or maintain access to power. He's just calmly pointing out that the emperor has no clothes - and occasionally, that the emperor is also just a bit of a prick.
Which, when considering the current media and political landscape, this is becoming something close to a public service, even if it comes from a parody account run by someone none of us has ever met, pretending to be a cat who lives at Number 10.
Maybe especially then. Because in a political landscape that feels increasingly like an especially bad series of one-man plays that make no sense anymore, the clearest voice in the room might just be the one making you laugh - on purpose.
Laughing Through the Collapse
On the subject of the role of humour and satire in politics, especially when things feel pretty bleak or ridiculous, his answer shows us something slightly more tender beneath all the satirical claws:
"Humour is so very important. The UK has been through some genuinely tough times in recent years. If something I've tweeted has made someone smile for just a second and it's made their day infinitesimally better then I've done my good deed for the day."
It's a philosophy that comes out in his gentler posts - the ones that aren't about skewering politicians or pointing out yet another absurd political decision but about offering something slightly warmer. Like his post from June:
There is melancholy that comes through in Larry's observations, though, about the medium itself. When he mentions that "Twitter was a great platform for silly humour, unfortunately the current ownership has calibrated it for other uses," he's describing something we've all felt over the past few years - the slow, agonising strangulation of joy by algorithm and agenda.
The platform, which once upon a time was a giant village green for jokes, observations, and casual human connection, feels like it’s been deliberately reshaped into something much angrier, far more polarised and above all, all about profitability. Larry's humour keeps its place, but it now lives in a space that has become increasingly hostile to the very thing that originally made it so valuable: the ability to make someone smile while doom scrolling yet again, if just for a moment.
That is, of course, not to say that everything is a joke or that every situation requires a scalpel, because even in this harsher environment, there are lines that Larry won’t necessarily cross - not because he can’t, but because, as we all should, he knows when not to.
Knowing When to Claw and When to Pause
Not everything is fair game, and Larry seems to understand this instinctively. When I ask about times he's felt the need to hold back, his response reveals the moral intuition that separates genuine satirists from the bog standard provocateurs we now see on the hellsite previously known as Twitter:
"I remember when Boris Johnson was admitted to intensive care. That was genuinely scary for a lot of people - there was a significant chance he could have died and, if the Prime Minister isn't safe, who is? That said, you can make jokes about most things and most situations. It helps people to cope."
It’s a timely reminder that real satire knows when to hold back. Acknowledge the genuine human stakes. Recognise when fear is legitimate.
This sort of restraint is increasingly rare. Anyone can kick someone when they're down, but it takes real satirical skill to maintain your edge while at the same time recognising when that edge might genuinely harm rather than help. Larry seems to grasp that his role isn't to add to the nation's pain during its darkest moments, but to offer perspective that helps people process it.
There's something profoundly mature about a satirical cat account that knows when to pause for decency. With performative outrage and algorithmic amplification seeming to be the main goal from many commentators, that kind of moral intuition feels almost revolutionary. Sometimes the most subversive thing you can do is simply know when to shut up.
Sometimes, restraint speaks louder than rhetoric. But knowing when not to speak is only half the equation. The other half - the harder half - is knowing what kind of politics is worth speaking up for.
False Nostalgia and the Hard Work of Governing
In my final question to Larry, I asked him about his perspective on executive power - the one thing he'd change if he were in charge for a day - and his response skips deftly past the populist fantasies that have dominated British politics for the better part of a decade:
"It would be lovely to believe there are lots of easy answers and that anyone could do better than those in power. The truth is that governing (responsibly) is hard. Brexit is a good example of this - in the run up the vote the leave campaign were able to claim that it would solve all sorts of problems and people naturally bought into that. Of course, it hasn't solved any problems and has created many more."
It's a reminder that came with receipts. As Larry noted in a tweet linking to YouGov polling on the question of, you guessed it, Brexit:
But Larry's most pointed observation goes deeper than any single policy failure:
"So much of politics these days seems to be false nostalgia; pretending that there was a perfect UK at some point in the last that we need to return to. That's just nonsense. The reality is that things have been getting better for a long time on most metrics. People just liked being young and remember it fondly."
He captured this perfectly in a tweet quoting Mary Schmich:
It's a worrying and very accurate diagnosis of the political moment we're living through. The "Take Back Control" and “I just want my country back” slogans, the "Make Britain Great Again" echoes, the endless invocation of some mythical golden age when everything worked better - all of it built on the fundamental human tendency to romanticise the past and blame the present on everyone except ourselves.
This nostalgia we’ve been seeing proliferate isn't just politically convenient, it's also harmful to actually achieving anything substantial. It stops us from dealing with real problems by telling the story that they didn't exist before, or that they can be solved by simply rewinding the clock. It turns politics into an exercise in rhetoric only, where the goal isn't to govern effectively in any real way, but to sell people a fantasy of restoration that was never really there to begin with.
Larry's perspective - earned through years of watching ministers come and go, promises made and broken, crises manufactured and genuine - is that governing is hard precisely because reality is complex. There are no easy answers, magic wands or simple returns to imaginary better times. There's just the patient, grinding, sometimes slow work of trying to make things incrementally better, one difficult decision at a time.
In a political culture addicted to simplicities and nostalgias, could that in fact be the answer? That adulthood, in politics as in life, means accepting that some problems don't have solutions - only management, and that the people promising you easy answers are usually the ones least equipped to deliver them.
The Last Grown-Up in the Room (Just Happens to Be a Cat)
In the end, maybe the reason Larry’s work strikes chords so well isn’t just because he’s funny, or sharp, or unburdened by ambition. Maybe it’s because he reminds us - in his wry, whiskered way - that politics doesn’t necessarily have to be this stupid. That truth can be plainspoken. That power can be mocked. That sometimes, the most grown-up voice in the room is the one refusing to play the game.
He hasn’t claimed to have all the answers. He’s not trying to flog anything. He’s not showing ankle for a cabinet post or a click-through rate. He just shows up, tells the truth (with a bit of light snark), and watches as the rest of us desperately scramble to keep up.
That a cat has become one of the most trusted commentators in British politics is perhaps both entirely absurd and completely understandable at the same time. Because in a world of PR-tested ministers and algorithm-chasing media, a sarcastic feline with a decent sense of timing might very well be the closest thing we’ve got to accountability at this stage.
He may not chase mice anymore, but he’s still very, very good at sniffing out the bullshit.
Sums it up completely.
There's something about a bear and a cat being the only sensible ones around.
Brilliant piece. I’ve followed Larry since the early days on Twitter, and this captures exactly why he’s endured — not just the wit, but the moral clarity, the timing, the restraint. In a sea of clout-chasers and spin, he’s been a steady voice of sanity. A cat with better instincts than most of Westminster.