The Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office

It is perhaps little known that not only humans are on the pay-roll of Her Majesty’s  Government. Like many old houses, the residence of the Prime Minister has a vermin problem. The cat with the responsibility of controlling the mice and rats that frequent the premises of the British Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street is titled The Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. There has been a resident chief mouser to the cabinet office since the days of Henry VIII.

The Chief Mouser is a civil servant and thus does not belong to the Prime Minister personally. It is uncommon for the Chief Mouser’s ‘term of office’ to correspond with that of the Prime Minister. As a civil servant, the Chief Mouser receives a salary; currently £100 yearly paid from the Treasury. Furthermore, as a cabinet official with set duties, the Chief Mouser has sometimes been inspected in regard to the efficiency of his work, just like any other civil servant. The last Chief Mouser to suffer such an inspection was Humphrey. However, there was no need for Humphrey to worry as it was said that his work was considerably better value than the Cabinet’s human pest controller, who charged £4,000 a year and was reported to have never caught a single mouse.

Humphrey, the best Chief Mouser on record, served in this position from 1988 to 1997 when he went into retirement in Scotland and was replaced by Sybil who passed away this last July. The post is currently vacant.

The longest serving Chief Mouser was Wilberforce who was in office between 1973 and 1987 and served under four British Prime Ministers: Edward Heath, Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher.

During her term in office, Margaret Thatcher was to be spotted in a Moscow supermarket during high-level talks in 1985, buying a can of Russian sardines, ‘allegedly for Wilberforce’ KGB spies concluded in their report.

Sources

HM Government Cabinet Office

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Images by Jessica Melling (Feature Image) and Jens Gyldenkærne Clausen