Some years ago I gave a few talks on the twitter habits of feline British civil servants. I continued to follow their twitter (oops, sorry, X) feeds. Most social media users have parasocial relationships of some kind. Mine just happened to be with UK cats. So it was sad to read that one of them died recently. Palmerston, who came to fame as the cat in the London Foreign Office, had retired and then taken up a new post in Bermuda.

Palmerston practiced what I called “collar diplomacy” and was often featured wearing a collar or drape featuring the flag or symbol of specific holidays or countries whose leaders or diplomats were visiting the Foreign Office. Whoever ran the account or came up with this idea is brilliant. It was a wonderful way to honor visitors and provide the common reader with information on other locations or cultural events. I learned a great deal. As a side note I learned quite a bit about the British budget from a short video “narrated” by Gladstone, the cat who lives in the Treasury.

It is a system that wouldn’t work well in America as the UK cats are not personal pets but working mousers (at least supposedly) in governmental offices. We don’t have that tradition. Animals in the White House are personal pets of the presidential family; they don’t stay on from administration to administration as Larry, who lives in Number 10 Downing Street, does. It’s a shame as we could use some unifying figures these days and a cat or dog might do the trick.

Through Palmerston I learned who the Foreign Secretary (equivalent to our Secretary of State) was and how he behaved towards “Palmy.” Sir Simon McDonald seemed like a nice fellow who made sure Palmerstone had personal space in the building, a place to get away from the noise and people. You can tell a lot about a person from how they treat animals, at least how their social media presents them as doing so. Justin Ng, Larry the Cat’s informal personal photographer, said Sir Simon was trustworthy, at least as far as Palmerston was concerned, and that carries weight with me. I still follow Sir Simon’s twitter (X) feed, even though he has moved on to other jobs. His book on leadership is on my “to be read” list.

Animal totems have been with humans from the beginning. We see them in prehistoric art, and in artistic and literary endeavors down through the ages. It is no surprise that they have followed us into the digital era. We often don’t know who the artists were, just as we don’t know who writes these cats’ twitter feeds, but their followings show that we accept them as the cats’ voices. America has Smokey the Bear and Punxsutawney Phil but those are mythic creatures, like Paul Bunyan’s Babe the Blue Ox. Phil is replaced every so many years but the name stays the same, not allowing for any individual personality.

This is a cultural difference, or perhaps just a moment in time. There have been Downing Street cats before Larry but none with quite the following that Larry has. Palmerston came in a close second, and he and Larry had a tense relationship at times. Palmerston wasn’t replaced (that we know of) in the Foreign Office and I wonder what will happen when Larry, who is 19, which is getting old for a cat, breathes his last. We will have to wait and see.

In any event, I was sad to read about Palmerston. He was an excellent public servant.