The World

I was re-viewing the opening episode of “The World at War” (as one does) – and was struck by the footage of Hitler looking cheerful, surrounded by yapping German shepherd dogs. The great dictator was a dog lover, and had a pet Alsatian called Blondi.

Churchill, by contrast, was a cat man.

Is there a political moral here? Obviously. Dictators like dogs because they are obedient, pack animals. Democrats like cats, because they are free spirits.

Once you start looking for the evidence, the trend becomes clear. Other famous cat-haters include Mussolini, Genghis Khan, Cherie Blair and Napoleon – the latter was once caught stabbing a wall repeatedly, because he believed there was a cat concealed behind it. By contrast, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt were well-known cat lovers.

Churchill’s political secretary, John Colville, made this diary entry at the height of the Battle of Britain:

“I went into the PM’s bedroom at around 10. He was lying in bed in a red dressing gown, smoking a cigar and dictating to Mrs Hill, who sat at his feet with the typewriter. The PM’s black cat Nelson, which he brought from the Admiralty and which has quite usurped the position of No.10′s official black cat, was stretched out across the bedcovers, and from time to time Winston would look at it lovingly and murmur: “Cat, darling”.

In the 1950s, Colville gave Churchill a ginger cat – which the great man called “Jock”, after Colville himself. In his will, Churchill provided a bequest for a ginger cat called Jock to live at his home, Chartwell, in perpetuity.

I will reluctantly acknowledge that there a a few exceptions to my dogs-dictators/cats-democrats theory. Lenin was apparently a cat lover. And so was Cardinal Richelieu – who went to the lengths of building a cattery in Versailles, and whose favourite beast was named “Ludovic le Cruel”. But Richelieu lived in a pre-democratic age. His heart was clearly in the right place.

Obviously, I am a cat lover. But I have thought hard before acknowledging this on my blog. When the FT first handed out some suggestions for blog-writers, one of them was – “Do not write about your cat.”

But why not? He is a magnificent beast – far more interesting than most of the people I write about. Here is a photo of him. (I also have four children, but I’m not going to bother you with photos of them).

And actually, there is a vestigial international-relations connection to my cat. He was adopted from a cat’s home in Brussels. We named him Louis, after the then Belgian foreign minister, Louis Michel – on the grounds that both the cat and the minister were hairy, over-weight, aggressive Belgians. Michel is now EU commissioner for overseas aid; and Louis has moved to London.