Taylor Swift acquired another luxurious cat following the loss of her previous one, expressing, “I’m a huge cat enthusiast; I adore having them around me. I couldn’t care less about the criticism from haters. Cats bring me joy, and that’s what matters.”
Taylor Swift acquired another luxurious cat following the loss of her previous one, expressing, “I’m a huge cat enthusiast; I adore having them around me. I couldn’t care less about the criticism from haters. Cats bring me joy, and that’s what matters.”
The truth is I’ve never been able to stand her. That faux-sweetness. The permanent victim status. The confected gratitude as she tours the world and goes to bed in a pit of money. People think she’s humble, but she’s never met a mirror she didn’t like. A renowned monogamist? Yeah, and I’m a Bichon Frisé… She has men come and go all through the day, satisfying her every craven desire. She is a monster, a hack, a trashy little fame whore. And it’s about time we all woke up to it.
Who is ‘she’, you ask, the cat’s grandmother? No, my grandmother was a saint. I refer, of course, to Choupette, Karl Lagerfeld’s blue-eyed Birman, often touted as one of the ‘richest cats in the world’. (The most well-PR’d cat in the world, more to the point.)
In rankings of famous cats, I’m forever number two, despite my fortune being a reported $97 million (eclipsing her estimated $13 million). But at least my conscience is clear. Tell me, who was the last person to see Lagerfeld alive? And who ended up left with a meaty portion of his fortune in the will? I’m not accusing anyone of anything. I’m just asking questions, that’s all.
For those unaware, I have been the primary cat companion of the global superstar Taylor Alison Swift for 10 years this summer.
In June 2014, when I was just a kitten, Lady Swift posted a photograph on Instagram of me, gazing back at her from her lap. ‘Meet Olivia Benson,’ she wrote, and, not for the first time, I broke the internet.
OMG what kind of cat is that?! I want one!’ fans would scream. The official answer is that I am a Scottish Fold, a valuable and distinctive breed of domestic cat due to our ‘folded’ ears, caused by a dominant gene mutation associated with osteochondrodysplasia. The unofficial answer is that I’m one of a kind, so back off and good luck, sister.
The name Olivia Benson was given to me in honour of the lead character in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show Lady Swift is a great fan of. Is it funny that everyone calls her Tay Tay, which sounds more like a cat than a grown woman, but my name sounds more like a grown woman than a cat? I don’t think that’s funny.
Whether I’ve since outgrown that character and become the more famous Olivia Benson is not for me to say, but I’ll just point out that anyone who denies it isn’t a serious person. I met the other ‘Olivia’ once. She’s smaller than she looks on TV.
(It would be remiss of me not to mention that Lady Swift also has two other cats, a second and lesser Scottish Fold called Meredith Grey and a Ragdoll named Benjamin Button. They are fine, I suppose. We are all named after fictional characters. Do not ask why; it is not my department.)
As is well known, Lady Swift does not allow access to her inner sanctum just willy-nilly, and she has signed off on every word printed here. When I asked if it would be possible to pen a few sentences for this newspaper to mark our 10th anniversary, she snapped shut her copy of The Spectator and said, ‘Are you kidding me? I love The Telegraph. I write to Richard Madeley about my dilemmas all the time.
PlusWord is my only real vice, other than sullen British men. I’ve been hoping they’ll ask me to do My Saturday for years, but I’m still waiting. In truth I’m worried mine is too similar to Gregg Wallace’s…’
She went on for a while. Long story short: it was a yes. And I am grateful, because nobody ever asks how I am. So now the world’s most famous pet with a living owner is finally unleashed, for one day only. (That’s a metaphor; I would never tolerate a leash.)
First, though, there were obviously a few things I was asked not to speak about, and I will respect Lady Swift’s privacy as much as she would like. I won’t, for instance, tell you that Joe Alwyn was my favourite of the boyfriends. Or that she voted for Trump in 2016, Biden in 2020 and will vote Trump again this year, because she believes it’s just easier to alternate.
Or that she has actually never been on Instagram, but gets an intern called Janine to write all her posts. Or that her longest celebrity relationship was in fact a nine-year unpublicised on/off romance with the British comedian Rory McGrath.
No, I will not tell you those things. But what I will tell you about is how blessed I’ve been to have lived with Lady Swift for all these happy years. Several memories stand out. Early on in our time together, for instance, she appeared on The Graham Norton Show and showed a photograph of me to the audience. John Cleese, sitting next to her, called me ‘the weirdest cat I’ve ever seen in my life’.
