Forget pundits rabbiting on, the only political animals that count are voters

Anew front has opened in Britain’s culture war: pets. A recent article in the Guardian, as ever the first to call for civilisation to fall into retreat, sneered that owning animals could be unethical as it entails treating sentient beings like property. Future generations will reflect sadly on these poor, benighted times, it implied, viewing mum taking the dog for a walk and dad cleaning out the fish tank much like we now view the gleeful revolutionary grandmothers who used to knit beside the guillotine.

We can laugh, but a political divide has long run through the homes of pet-owners. Poll after poll, even psychological studies, have found that dog lovers lean Right, while liberals are more likely to be cat people. The boring explanation is that this is a statistical mirage, a mere function of property and place: Tories in the suburbs and countryside have space and stability enough for little Fido to grow up happy; for the liberals, whose cramped urban flats are mostly just places to sleep, itinerant Mogg is a more convenient companion.

But surely there is more to it than that. Dogs are loyal, securityconscious, dependable and familyminded, all qualities prized by the Right. Cats are fickle, amoral, citizens of nowhere. The personal is increasingly the political, where the supermarkets we shop in, the books we read, and the holidays we go on all say a great deal about the way we

Cats are frustrated Thatcherites: ferociously independent self-starters hunting to thrive in a hostile environment

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion vote. Why shouldn’t pets be political animals too?

If so, the Conservatives appear to have swallowed whole the pet caricature I describe above. Their election campaign was essentially a laser-guided pitch to doggy Britain: vote for us for stability, security, and a few more treats from the table. All very well, but there is another side to man’s best friend. As much as I love them, dogs are dependent, stupid, and needy. The dark underbelly to prioritising dependability over dynamism is that you suddenly start to look awfully Left-wing.

Cats, too, have another side. They’re fiercely independent self-starters with superb personal hygiene. Ferocious in defence of their territory, whatever indifference they might display towards their loved ones often masks a quiet acknowledgement of their social obligations. In short, they’re frustrated Thatcherites, hunting to thrive in a hostile environment – as indeed are many of their owners.

If the Tories insist on distancing themselves from economic liberalism, and what Theresa May’s allies have described as “capitalism’s creative winds of destruction”, they’ll forever lose young, urban cat voters who are already put off by issues such as Brexit.

This is another way of saying that the trend of treating politics like a marketing exercise – of taking a data point about an individual (they own their home, they have a dog) and then endlessly flogging them the message you think they want to hear – is more foolish than its boffin proponents believe. Unlike real political animals, few voters have neat and tidy ideological brains: cats and dogs both have a home with the Tories.