In this excerpt from his book Political Animals, Peter Cardwell describes Jeremy Heywood’s battle with the Cabinet Office cats.
Mother-and-son duo Evie and Ossie patrol the corridors of the Cabinet Office, the central nervous system of government. This is where the boss of the whole civil service has his empire. That boss is sadly not a cat but a human being: Sir Chris Wormald. He’s also the Cabinet Secretary, sitting beside the Prime Minister at Cabinet next door in 10 Downing Street and guiding him through the process of governing.
But when Evie and Ossie arrived in November 2016, it was Sir (later Lord) Jeremy Heywood who ran the show. The slight issue was that Heywood was no fan of cats. Indeed, his antipathy was such that, on one occasion, he sent an email to his chief of staff, Kata Escott, outlining his displeasure with a particular habit of Evie and Ossie’s. Escott then forwarded the email to the cats’ biggest fan – and, as she had brought them into the building, their effective ‘mum’ – senior civil servant Sue Gray, who would later become Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.
The subject line was ‘Cat Faeces’ and it was written in a style Gray remembers as being ‘the classic civil servant… while obviously not being happy!’ Heywood wrote: ‘Can I just say that I have had enough of walking past CF on the staircase? This is a place of work, not a zoo or pet shop. Final warning.’
‘It was a very Jeremy email,’ Gray tells Political Animals. ‘So I messaged him back to say, who’s the final warning for – me or the cats? He couldn’t stand them. And yet, he kept his room really hot, it was like a sauna, so they would gravitate to his office, lie on his desk and he was really not happy.’
Suzanne Heywood, Jeremy’s wife and the author of his biography, What Does Jeremy Think?, mentioned the email in her eulogy at his funeral in 2018. ‘We were all in stitches,’ chuckled Gray, remembering her former boss with affection.
Suzanne Heywood confirmed to Political Animals that cats, along with ‘karaoke, helicopters, rats and urban foxes’, were amongst the things her husband most detested. However, she emphasised that Evie and Ossie were still well looked after; they loved sitting on the comfy chair in her husband’s office when he wasn’t around, and his private office staff kept Dreamies ready for them alongside the rest of the office snacks on their treat table.
‘Occasionally we had people that have worked in the Cabinet Office who have an allergy, so we took steps to make sure to keep the cats contained in a particular area – that’s done in consultation with the individual,’ remembers Gray. ‘I don’t think there was ever a problem with any individual, apart from, I think, Jeremy, who was the person who really loathed them.’ However, plenty of other people loved them.
Many of the Whitehall cats’ names – though Larry is an exception – have a strong association with the history of the building they live in. Evie is named after Dame Evelyn Sharp, the first female Permanent Secretary, while Ossie is named after Sir Edward Osmotherly, author of the Osmotherly Rules, which set out how civil servants should give evidence to select committees.
Evie and Ossie are rescue cats from the Celia Hammond Animal Trust. They were found as strays living on the streets of east London. Evie, the mother, arrived at the rescue centre with three kittens, of whom Ossie was one. She was nervous in the beginning, but soon became a very friendly, calm and sweet natured cat. Two of the kittens were rehomed together, but the trust wanted Evie to stay with at least one of her kittens.
Peter Cardwell is a presenter on the Talk network, and was previously special adviser to Secretaries of State in the Northern Ireland Office, Home Office, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and Ministry of Justice.
