International Workplace cat Palmerston retires to countryside

Palmerston, the International Workplace’s resident cat, has retired from mousing duties to “spend extra time stress-free away from the limelight”.

In a “letter”, he says he has moved away from Whitehall and is now climbing bushes reasonably than “overhearing all of the overseas dignitaries’ conversations”.

The black-and-white rescue cat, who has greater than 105,000 Twitter followers, arrived from Battersea in 2016.

He has been recognized to conflict with Larry, Quantity 10’s principal mouse-catcher.

Their decidedly undiplomatic disputes – which have included a number of hissy matches and a stand-off in full view of the press in Downing Avenue – are usually not thought to have hastened his departure.

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Named after the famously interventionist and amorous 19th-Century International Secretary and Prime Minister Viscount Palmerston, Palmerston has typically featured in pictures involving visiting officers.

In a distinctly anthropomorphic letter despatched to International Workplace everlasting secretary Sir Simon McDonald, Palmerston “writes” that whereas there, he “pawed quite a few memorandums” and arrange his personal “parallel community” for intelligence gathering.

He provides that, through the pandemic he, like so many different civil servants, has determined to “do business from home” reasonably than within the workplace, whereas remaining “as diligent as ever”.

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Palmerston, whose age in cat years is unsure, making a pension uncertain, has moved to an undisclosed location “within the countryside”.

He guarantees to stay “an envoy for the UK” and praises his fellow “diplocats” and “diplodogs”.

Palmerston, whose letter mercifully refrains from puns on “paw-licy” and contractual “claw-ses”, says he’ll take pleasure in extra “me time” over the summer time and past.

A alternative has but to be appointed, to the possible delight of International Workplace mice, who’ve but to remark.

Doable names for Palmerston’s successor – assuming the hyperlink to former overseas secretaries is maintained – embody Canning, Bathurst, Balfour, Eden, Rifkind and Miliband.