Cat flap

Well, it would make a cat laugh. Actually, it does make a cat laugh '“ all over the UK at this present moment cats are laughing, snorting with mirth, holding their sides with their furry little paws, heaving and gasping with unbridled hilarity. Rolling on the floor they are, positively beside themselves. They are in that wonderful and sadly forgotten state of painful rollicking agonising glorious giggles, remembered from the collective hysteria of school assemblies and other forbidden times when One Should Not Laugh, but must... must.

PussyGate '“ or CatFlap? '“ has a huge appeal for our furry friends whose lives hitherto, if not quite blameless in the matter of songbirds and being caught short in the guest bedroom, have been fairly apolitical. And now they are propelled, wonderfully, into high politics and what one sincerely hopes will be the permanent discomfiture of any politician who believes what they read without first engaging what passes, on a good day, for their mind. It was a cat wot done it '“ a cat wot punctured the monstrous nonsense that is hawked about by those with policies and no principles, sound bites and no sense, manifestos and no morals. If Mrs May, for it is she of whom we speak, has a feline companion then I strongly advise bribery: the very best butter and the most luscious liver should be offered to little Tiddles: anything less and that wise animal will not disguise her amusement nor cast down her mocking eyes.

The full story

The cat of which we speak '“ or perhaps more accurately the love which cannot speak its name because puss was anonymised in the careful judgment made by the senior immigration Judge Gleeson who heard the case '“ was owned by a Bolivian who wanted to stay in the UK, despite being neither an illegal entrant nor a criminal. He shared it with his girlfriend. It was a small piece of evidence among other more substantial indications that they had a life together. His claim to remain here was upheld largely on concessions made by the Home Office '“ they got the law wrong and had to admit it '“ and was based on previous regulations that meant that a settled relationship with a UK citizen for more than two years gave one certain rights to continue having that life.

The judge, seeing a joke on the horizon and grabbing it with both hands with a joie de vivre entirely admirable in someone who has to deal with the Home Office every day, made a crack about how kitty now did not have to adapt to catching Bolivian mice, and put brackets around her name. OK, it's not up there with Gussie Fink-Nottle at the Market Snodsbury Grammar School prizegiving, but it was pretty good for a judge and an immigration judge at that. They are people who deal with the horrors of the world, with the pain of exile and the memory of torture, and making jokes at all shows a resilience of spirit which one can only applaud. But the joke got reported '“ and misreported '“ and the whole case fell into that dangerous swampy hinterland of factoids and myth where the untrained mind seeks truth.

I did not make this up...

And then it emerges like some misbegotten creature of the deep into a speech by the home secretary at a Tory party conference. Truly dear reader I did not make this up... which is what Mrs May said before she used it as an example of how the Human Rights Act was all a nasty mistake.

Words now fail me. There are at least a quarter of a million words in the English language, not counting tenses, and they all fail me. One needs maths here: stupid to the power of 100 million? Ignorant to a factor of 29 zillion? I make no claims to mathematical certainty, nor even to advanced legal research which is best left to our clever pupils '“ but even the least worthy of our publically funded criminal defence barristers can find a bleeding law report! The case was law-reported. Let me say this again '“ the case was in the law reports.

This was a speech by the home secretary. About a case which was reported. It was wrong. It was not just wrong: it was laughably, cat-shakingly, career tremblingly, government-shatteringly wrong. Whoever put the joke in is not the villain here: stupid yes, untrained yes, probably some poor bloody intern whose daddy knows someone '“ but the home secretary did not query it. Did Mrs May believe it when she read the draft? Or did she simply not care whether it was true or not? How deep is her contempt for us all that she said it without having the wit to check it out?

Apparently stroking cats soothes one. Puss-puss? Puss... come here.....