They Would Have Had to Take Me to the Tower First

A forgotten pandemic decision that should never have been considered

Patriots — and fellow animal lovers.

This isn’t something I’ve ever seen widely discussed, but during the pandemic there was a point when, after stories began circulating about cats catching the virus, the government considered the mass culling of all 11 million cats in the UK. Pets included.

I had five cats at the time. None were outdoor cats — they had a fully enclosed, cat-proofed garden using the existing garden fence.

They’d have had to take me to the Tower of London first.
How about you?

As it turned out the cats were getting it from us, not them giving it to us.

a cat wearing a pre facemask

To me, this episode perfectly captures the sheer chaos inside Whitehall at the time.

What makes it worse is this: the UK government had already taken part in pandemic preparedness planning before COVID. Not as some vague idea, but through international and cross-border exercises and meetings — mostly buried under bureaucratic language rather than headlines.

These were typically framed as:

• “Health security” and “emergency preparedness”

• Pandemic or influenza simulation exercises

• Cross-government and cross-border outbreak planning

• EU / WHO-linked health resilience meetings

• Scenario planning for respiratory disease outbreaks

In other words: what to do in the event of a pandemic — even if they didn’t use that plain language publicly.

And yet, when the real thing arrived, it was as if none of it existed.

Boris Johnson was a vote-winner and personally likeable — but he caused enormous harm. The so-called “Boris wave” alone did lasting damage, and many believe it was retaliation given his lack of enthusiasm for Brexit.

Brexit itself was never completed. What we ended up with was a weak, half-finished deal. Don’t blame Brexit for the state of the country — blame the incomplete and badly negotiated version we were left with.

Would Labour have been worse? Almost certainly. But that doesn’t excuse what happened.

And the real kicker? After all that supposed preparation, they still didn’t have a clue.

The COVID inquiry so far appears to have achieved very little.
Cost to the taxpayer: £292 million.

We were governed by fear, paralysis, and institutional self-preservation — not competence.

And millions of families could have been left even more devastated and more traumatised if they had have gone ahead and ordered the destruction of millions of family pets. It would have been unforgivable and indefensible