On the 5th of February, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch was sitting in her Westminster office delivering a live interview on ITV’s Peston when a rather unexpected guest made a surprise appearance.
With the interview in full flow, viewers spotted what appeared to be a mouse darting along the skirting board behind Ms Badenoch, scurrying past a radiator on the right side of the frame before disappearing out of shot.
The clip went viral within minutes, social media campaigner Kwajo Tweeneboa tagged her directly and offered to “email Westminster Council to get pest control round,” and ITV Politics posted the footage on TikTok where it racked up hundreds of thousands of views.
It was a funny clip, but it also struck a chord with the Pest Solutions team because it demonstrated that pests don’t care who you are or where you live. If there is food, warmth, shelter and easy access to be found in any property, that property (As Ms Badenoch is now well aware!) becomes a highly attractive home for rodents such as mice and rats.
Westminster Has Been Losing This Battle for Years
The mouse that photobombed Kemi Badenoch’s interview wasn’t a lost visitor that wandered in off the street. It was one of what appears to be a very large and very well-established population of mice that have been living in the Houses of Parliament for years.
Freedom of Information requests have revealed that Parliament spent over £460,000 on pest control between 2020 and 2023, with the annual bill rising from £109,563 to £126,162 over that period. In a single year there were 549 recorded pest incidents on the Parliamentary Estate, and 348 of those (roughly 63%) were mice. Mouse droppings were found in 19 separate locations during a hygiene inspection, which was enough to earn the House of Commons a low food hygiene rating.
Part of the issue is the building itself. The Houses of Parliament sit right next to the River Thames and Westminster Underground Station, both of which provide harbourage and transit routes for rodents. The building dates back to the mid-1800s and the infrastructure is riddled with cavities, old pipe runs, and gaps in the fabric that are almost impossible to fully seal.
If It Can Happen to Kemi Badenoch, It Can Happen to Anyone
The fact is that mice and other pests don’t recognise status, security clearance, or property value. They recognise warmth, food, and a gap in the brickwork, and a mouse can squeeze through a hole as small as 6mm (roughly the width of a biro pen), so even the most well-maintained building will have entry points that most people would never think to check.
Westminster isn’t even the most famous building in the UK to have a rodent problem. Buckingham Palace has been battling rats and mice since Queen Victoria moved in during the 1830s, and it got bad enough that she appointed an official rat-catcher called Jack Black, who went by the rather brilliant title of “Rat and Mole Catcher to Her Majesty.” Exterminators were called to the Palace kitchens as recently as 2019, and during Barack and Michelle Obama’s first state visit in 2011, a mouse was spotted running around inside the building while the President of the United States was in residence.
The Problem Is Getting Worse, Not Better
The Badenoch clip might have brought the issue to public attention, but the trend it represents has been building for years and it’s not just a Westminster problem. Mice and rat infestations are rising sharply across the UK, and we’re seeing it firsthand in our own callout numbers.
Here in Glasgow, we know the picture all too well. Glasgow City Council recorded 10,323 reports of rodents from residents in 2022 compared with 7,894 the year before, a jump of 31% that placed the city fifth in the UK for rodent callouts.
Back in 2024, our Service Manager Gemma Sutherland and Advanced Technician Iain Mackinnon were featured on BBC Reporting Scotland discussing Glasgow’s growing rodent problem. The city recorded 5,389 residential rat and mouse callouts that year alone.
At a national level, councils carried out 291,132 pest-related home visits in 2024, which works out at roughly one every two minutes. That was up 9% from 2022, and 91% of those visits were for rodents. Local authorities collectively spent £40 million on rodent control in a single year, and the BPCA estimates around 80,000 annual callouts for mice alone, though the true figure is almost certainly higher given how many infestations go unreported or are tackled with DIY methods that don’t actually work.
Why Mice Are Winning Right Now
The same factors that make Westminster so attractive to mice are playing out in towns and cities up and down the country, and they’re all working in the mouse’s favour at the same time.
We’ve had warmer, wetter winters in recent years that are extending breeding seasons and keeping rodent populations active well into late autumn, when numbers would normally start to drop off. That seasonal dip that pest controllers used to rely on has been pushed back or in some cases just hasn’t happened at all, which means more mice surviving through winter and more of them breeding come spring.
Waste management is another major factor, and one we feel strongly about. Overflowing bins, inconsistent collection schedules, littering in urban areas, it all provides a ready food source, and once mice find food they don’t leave. We see this constantly in Glasgow and it’s a problem that local authorities and the public need to take more seriously.
On top of all that, chemical resistance is making infestations harder to resolve even when professionals are involved. Anticoagulant resistance has been identified in mouse populations at Westminster, and we’re seeing similar patterns in our own work across Scotland. Mice that are genetically resistant to conventional rodenticides simply aren’t affected by them, so a pest controller who doesn’t understand the local resistance status could end up treating an infestation with products that won’t work.
There’s No Shame in Having Mice
One thing that stood out about the Badenoch clip was how everyone reacted. People found it hilarious, and fair enough. But imagine that same mouse had appeared in your kitchen during a video call with your boss, or scurried across the living room while friends were round for dinner. I doubt many of us would be laughing.
Kemi Badenoch works in one of the most looked-after buildings in the country, with dedicated pest control contractors and a six-figure annual budget for the problem, and a mouse still strolled past her on national television. Buckingham Palace, with all the resources of the Crown Estate behind it, has been fighting mice since the 1830s and hasn’t won yet.
Mice need food, warmth, and shelter. That’s it. If your property provides any combination of those three things, and nearly every building in the UK does, then you’re a potential target regardless of how spotless your kitchen is. So if the Leader of the Opposition can have a mouse run past her on live TV in front of millions of people, you’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about. Just pick up the phone.
When It’s Time to Call In the Professionals
Here at Pest Solutions, our technicians deal with mouse infestations every day across Scotland and the North of England. We understand the biology, behaviour, and local resistance patterns of the mice we’re dealing with, and we tailor every treatment to the specific property and infestation. We’re a BPCA member company and all of our treatments come with a 30-day guarantee from the date of the final visit.
Whether it’s a flat in Glasgow, a farmhouse in Aberdeenshire, or (as we’ve all now seen) a parliamentary office in Westminster, mice don’t discriminate and neither do we when it comes to getting rid of them. The difference between Westminster’s £460,000 problem and yours is that yours probably doesn’t need years of failed attempts and Freedom of Information requests to sort out. It just needs a phone call.
Get in touch today on 0800 027 2555 for advice, to arrange a free survey, or to book a treatment visit.
