Republicans beware: weaponising pets is a political minefield | Stewart Lee
The Ohio senator JD Vance has attacked “childless cat ladies”, going so far as to suggest infertile cat owners, or cat owners choosing life without children, should enjoy reduced voting rights. Donald Trump has already alienated Elvis Presley fans (“Elvis didn’t have 50,000 people and he had a guitar… I don’t have a guitar”) and the wind (“I never understood wind … I’ve studied it better than anybody”). Now Vance is politicising pets. The MP for Clacton, Nigel Farage, has called Vance a “top man”. Farage fuels violence, as we saw in the moving cocaine-and-cider vigil in Southport last week. Should Clacton cats, and Clacton cat ladies, fear the fist of Farage?Rightwingers aiming to weaponise pets should remember the old showbiz adage: “Never work with animals and children.” Especially if, as the American alt-right theorist Jack Psobiec suggests they should, the Republicans sign up the Trumpanzee rock star Ted Nugent. The blood sports enthusiast, and author of the song Jailbait, already has demonstrably poor history with both wildlife and the young.In 2019, the then prime minister Boris Johnson acquired a jack russell cross called Dilyn to try to seem normal. But the dog savaged the stuffed lemur of an award-winning boy, spaffed up random visiting dignitaries’ trousers, and sexually assaulted a stool made from the foot of an elephant killed by Roosevelt, disrespecting the special relationship and endangered species simultaneously. The journalists outside Chequers looked from dog to man, and from man to dog, and from dog to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.The former prime minister David Cameron’s disputed student friendship with an accommodating pig has become legendary, largely because no one can prove it ever happened. The story was allegedly sourced by the Brexit idiot Isabel Oakeshott from the then Westminster Conservative MP Mark Field, but he denies everything. Piggate aside, Field is most famous for grappling a Greenpeace protester at a Mansion House banquet in 2019 while shouting: “This is what happens when people like you disturb our dinner.” If Field had been at the Oxford feast where Cameron befriended the pig, the Mansion House banquet wouldn’t have been the most disturbed dinner he ever attended, so he would definitely have remembered it.We all know that Alastair Campbell, when Tony Blair was on the verge of first admitting the sheer depth of his religious convictions, told him: “We don’t do God.” What’s less well known is that the spinmeister general also advised “We don’t do pets,” when Blair suggested winning back old Labour’s northern heartlands by releasing video of himself and his wife, Cherie, dressed as prize whippet and a racing pigeon respectively.But in choosing to denigrate cats and their owners, are the Republicans on to something? In 2021, researchers revealed that US voters with conservative beliefs tended to dislike cats. The former Washington Post reporter Christopher Ingraham summarised the findings: “Conservatives hold strong anti-cat biases, likely stemming from cats’ disregard for social hierarchies, their general lack of loyalty, and their refusal to submit to authority.” Are cats instinctively left of centre? Can it be mere coincidence that Rishi Sunak’s memorably soggy election date announcement was further sabotaged by the Downing Street cat, Larry, shuffling about on the No 10 steps, like Eric Morecambe in the background of an excruciating Ernie Wise song?I do not wish to make light of postal workers’ suffering, but can it also be mere coincidence that, during the decade in which the Conservatives’ dismantling of Royal Mail escalated, attacks on mail delivery people by presumably right-leaning dogs have also increased, with more than 1,000 post-persons losing a finger or part of one in the past five years? The Royal Mail’s Lizz Lloyd was rightly angry to see “postman-flavour” dog treats for sale at a stately home. It is as wrong as if the JoJo Maman Bébé line were to make costly leotards emblazoned with the face of Trump’s rock-star supporter Ted Nugent.I allow two cats to live with me: one rescued from a litter in a back garden where foxes slaughtered its siblings; the other found in a cardboard box outside the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Kingdom Hall on Stamford Hill. As an adoptee, I relate to them, and am fascinated as I watch their abandonment issues develop. Archie, at only a year old, drinks far too much cat milk, while Winged Ear Fingerling, a year older, I estimate, has retreated into a solipsistic world of narcissistic fantasy. And yes I, a cat man, didn’t vote for Reform.As if to prove the point, Adolf Hitler, arguably the most rightwing person who has ever lived, of course had a dog, which was given to him by his personal secretary, the Nazi Martin Bormann, another known rightwinger. Hitler named the German shepherd Blondi, which was rather on the nose given his passionate belief in Aryan supremacy. It’s as if Nigel Farage had instead named his two dogs, Pebble and Baxter, after what he believed in: Money and Nothing.But today Blondi seems a better pet name, politically, than that favoured by the Dambuster airman Wing Commander Guy Gibson, whose dog’s name cannot be mentioned now because of the wokeness gone mad, those wokies and that wokery. Indeed, the dog’s Scampton gravestone was replaced by the RAF in 2020, at a cost of £675. This was fortunate, as the former RAF base’s fences are now used to contain asylum seekers, and an actual grave bearing a racial slur would make them paranoid. The Conservative party leadership contender and Disney-mural desecrator Robert Jenrick would doubtless have had the original grave reinstated, a deterrent even more powerful than Rwanda. I think all politicians should play by 70s swimming pool rules. No petting! Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee is on Now TV. He will preview new material at Stewart Lee Introduces the Legends of Indie at the Lexington, London, in August with guests Connie Planque (12 August), Swansea Sound (13) and David Lance Callahan (14)Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk. More
