It goes on. Another week of uncontrollable global drama. Another week of daunting economic news. More days, despite the spring sunshine, of almost visible national gloom. So let us cut to the quick and talk, because we must, of Larry the cat.
Downing Street, says one insider who knows the place well, “smells of failure”. On an early morning, there is an acrid, decaying, greyish tang. But it is not a figment of political imagination: it is the odour of mice and rats, many of which are still skittering around the maze of old offices while others are all too clearly dead.
But – and here comes Larry, albeit not at speed – if dead, dead of old age. In the best traditions of the British state, No 10 dealt with the long-standing endemic rodent problem in central London by boasting of having its own “mouser”. Larry, now 18, arrived in Downing Street in 2011, having been adopted from the Battersea Dogs and Cats home by David Cameron. Originally planned as a pet for Cameron’s children, he was described then as a “good ratter” and as having “a high chase-drive and hunting instinct”.
That was then. Now on his sixth prime minister, Larry is old, fat and very lazy. On the upside, he maintains a lively and witty social media presence, posting on everything from international politics (Larry is more critical of Trump than Keir Starmer allows himself to be) to Mother’s Day. On the downside, with so many friendly people bringing him so many meals on an average day, he has no interest whatsoever in chasing mice or rats. Hence the smell.
For people working there, Larry (poor Larry) has become a metaphor. Much loved, he has grown fat and idle on well-meaning welfarism. Problems scuffle and twitch around him but he barely notices. His natural enemies mock, and he no longer cares. Rather than getting on with the job at hand, he spends his life on social media. Like everyone else in Britain under 30, he wants to be an influencer.
But what Larry is unlikely to have grasped is that the government is all about solving practical problems and restless change. And this is now an operation feeling a sense of surrounding crisis and spooked by its own frailty: it’s now less a Labour government in any traditional sense than a thin line of defenders facing a national siege. Hemmed in by a military enemy (Vladimir Putin) and an economic one (Donald Trump), Downing Street insiders know they need to think differently and move fast to survive.
Yet Downing Street is an outdated, creaking operation with nothing like the expertise or serious grip of Whitehall, and the decisive urgency it desperately needs. As Dominic Cummings spotted during the Boris Johnson years, the administration of “modern” Britain is simply archaic.
This is not a technical question. We are a nation succumbing to despair. That is not unprecedented. During my lifetime, there have been periodic, almost regular, throbs of national anguish, from the late 1970s to the latter Tory years of Truss and Sunak. Low productivity, squalor and disorder at home and an unravelling foreign policy have led to grim pessimism about who we are and where we are going. Indeed, this is now so implanted it has become part of our national character. We carry on, just as Larry carries on, despite rodents and failure.
But as the Prime Minister understands, we cannot live with a political centre that has given up. That feels particularly the case in a week when the British are confronted by a trade war – as I write, all the signs continue to be that Washington has rejected an opt-out from tariffs – as well as rising bills for failing utilities, new taxes and uncontrolled migration.
As the crisis tightens, previous thinking is jettisoned. Steel privatisation is rising up the agenda. Defence is replacing net zero as the core of the industrial strategy. The Sentencing Council has been reined in by Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary, over “two-tier” attitudes to jailing criminals.
On migration, Labour MPs are talking openly about challenging Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which covers respect for private and family life and has been used to prevent deportations. If the challenge fails, Labour may yet be driven, like the Tories, to contemplate leaving the ECHR entirely.
There is a shift. There is a change of tone. You can feel the government moving under pressure from outside events, and towards insurrectionary Reform-leaning voters.
I have written before about a parliamentary smash coming. But Downing Street is more concerned about how to drive change faster and harder than about back-bench dissent. One small example: once Starmer and the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, had given the go-ahead, it still took weeks to end the misuse of government credit cards.
Another example: in trying to assess how AI is shifting the way government works, some 1,500 senior civil servants were sent questionnaires, along with a few quite hard maths problems to solve and send back to Downing Street. A grand total of 20 managed the maths correctly. All have been brought straight into the Cabinet Office, where a Cummings-like data centre is now being constructed.
Starmer is as deadly serious about reform as he is about Reform. Forget April being the cruellest month; this is going to be another hard year. Perhaps Trump will yet come to Starmer’s rescue, but it seems as if the effect of his tariffs on global trade will shatter the maths of the Spring Statement.
By October we will be talking about tax rises again. That is going to require radical thinking from the Treasury. That means the war bond for increased defence spending that I have argued for in these pages, and which senior figures in the Bank of England say privately, is eminently possible. It means changing the way quantitative tightening is dealt with, bringing it into line with American and European practice, to save billions a year. And yes, it means looking again at the unwise tax promises of last summer.
Some liberal-minded Labour MPs, as well as left-wing ones, are deeply worried about the government’s direction, although newer MPs facing Reform in their constituencies quietly applaud it. The halving and then freezing of the health element of Universal Credit for the rest of the decade is widely loathed in the Commons as well as by constituents.
Meanwhile, we should expect a major cabinet reshuffle in the summer, the fallout from which could be serious. Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, has openly raised the fact of briefings against her and other female ministers at a recent cabinet meeting.
The single most important thing we need from Starmer now is a clear and repeated expression of political belief: in a world tilting towards Trump’s conservative revolution, what are the British values that are non-negotiable? On rights, demeanour, behaviour, what are our red lines? What would it mean, not to make Britain great again, but to make Britain British again?
For not every scenario ahead is entirely grim. It is possible that a real turn towards Europe and genuine boost for defence manufacturing begins to bring Britain the better paid and skilled jobs that have so long eluded us. It is possible that Starmer achieves his ambition of a smaller but more effective government. It is possible, as well, that an eventual UK-US trade deal persuades international investors to come here.
Finally, in the complex, intimate, emotional dance of the emperors that the Ukraine ceasefire deal has become, it may even be that Putin has made a big mistake, stepped on Trump’s corns and accidentally saved Ukraine from obliteration. To govern is to hope.
It is also, however, to keep reacting, keep changing and keep fighting. Larry may be quietly snoozing on the edge of a faded Turkish rug, dreaming of his next mildly amusing tweet. The human occupants of No 10 have no such luxury.
[See also: What is school for?]
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This article appears in the 02 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What is school for?