Puss in briefs

A Pakistani politician has played down the embarrassment of one of his briefings being streamed live to Facebook with the cat filter on.

“The cat filter was turned on by mistake,” said Shaukat Yousafzai. “Let’s not take everything so seriously.”

But it’s our job to take everything seriously, and we have some questions. Can it just be accepted as a coincidence, for a start, that his first name sounds a bit like “show cat”? And who accidentally streams themselves as a cat? We’ve never heard of that before. Generally speaking, these filters take some seeking out. It’s not like they’re the default setting.

Is it not more likely that Yousafzai actually is a cat? Not an ordinary one, but one that relies on a team of experts to activate a human filter from which he can sustain a credible political career. Groundbreaking technology that briefly crashed that day in Peshawar to expose him and his peers in their true feline forms. If so, they needn’t have worried, because people generally like cats.

But imagine how that technology could have humanised the Tory leadership race in the UK; a contest that recently forced Emily Maitlis to chair a hubristic five-way squabble between a lizard, a toad, a pig, a rat and a ginormous, self-gratifying blobfish in full Donald Trump fancy dress.