Sybil

An Edinburgh import to Whitehall

Sybil was a black short-haired cat belonging to Alistair Darling, who in September 2007 became Chancellor of the Exchequer in Gordon Brown's newly formed cabinet. Darling's family home is in Edinburgh; when the family moved into the official residence at 11 Downing Street in September 2007, the cat was brought south on the East Coast Main Line. Darling's 2011 memoir Back from the Brink: 1,000 Days at Number 11 records his wife Margaret's reluctance to leave the cat in Scotland and the consequent ministerial-car arrangement that moved Sybil to the Downing Street flat above the Chancellor's offices.

The first cat at Number 10 or 11 since Humphrey

Sybil's arrival was widely reported as the first formally resident cat in the Downing Street complex since Humphrey, the long-serving Cabinet Office mouser of the John Major years, retired in November 1997. The Brown administration had not kept a cat in the early months of 2007. Press coverage on 11 September 2007 — the day Sybil's presence was confirmed by Number 11 — included BBC and Reuters reports calling her the new Chief Mouser, although no such formal title was ever conferred. The Treasury's mouse population was at that point being managed by pest-control contractors, not by any in-house cat.

A short and unhappy tenure

The arrangement did not survive the first year. Sybil, by the family's own account, did not adapt to the indoor life of a working government residence with intermittent footfall from the Cabinet Office staff and the security detail. Darling sent the cat back to the Edinburgh house in early 2008 in the care of his constituency aide. Sybil lived out her remaining years in Scotland and died in 2009; her death was confirmed by Darling's office to the BBC on 27 July 2009. The next cat at the Downing Street complex was Larry, who arrived from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home in February 2011 under the Cameron coalition government, restoring the British political-cat tradition after a three-year break.