For the past five weeks people have repeatedly said to me, “You must be really busy!” I’ve had to explain that elections aren’t like that; in fact, from the point of view of cartoonists, they’re boring. The only real fun comes when the wheels fall off the party machines and their careful choreography collapses into farce. But in this election even the Tories’ serial weapons-grade balls-ups are becoming a bore, serving merely to remind me of the universal truth that reality will always, always be weirder than anything satire could think up in a million years.
That said, in the empty hours of this interminable death watch while we’ve waited for the Tory tumbril finally to trundle to the guillotine, I’ve been reflecting on the past 14 years, and how the worst government of my lifetime has been succeeded five times by one that was even worse.
Take David Cameron, Britain’s very first gap-year prime minister, whose congenital complacency and effortless sense of entitlement had already equipped him with fathomless depths of risibility. Ever since he had been elected Tory leader, I’d drawn Cameron as Little Lord Fauntleroy, with an added dash of Basil Fotherington-Tomas. It’s always best to go for the obvious joke. (For the past year I’ve been touring a show about the nine prime ministers I’ve been paid to draw over the past 42 years. When I reach Cameron I show a slide of a mortadella sausage. Some punters think this references his complexion, but actually it’s about Luis Buñuel’s assertion that Benjamin Péret’s belief that mortadella was made by blind people was the ultimate Surrealist statement. Until, that is, Cameron attacked the kids looting TK Maxx during the 2011 riots for having “too great a sense of entitlement” – or that may have been Boris Johnson, yet another Old Etonian using our country as his personal playpen. Either way, irony’s corpse hit the pavement screaming.)
Then, because Cameron’s charm (George Osborne described it as the Tories’ secret weapon) signally failed to win a majority against Gordon Brown’s crumbling Labour government, his comic potential was massively augmented by the forced coalition with the Liberal Democrats. I admit, halfway through the 2010 election campaign I still couldn’t draw Nick Clegg, because hitherto there’d been no real occasion to.
However, when I watched the first leaders’ debate (the one that spawned Cleggmania) I saw that he had a very noddy head, and physically was a weird amalgam of Private Pike from Dad’s Army and Pinocchio. I opted for the second trope, the little wooden boy who wanted to be a real politician. The readers got it instantly, and for five happy years Cleggnocchio was sawn into bits, dismantled, then reassembled as everything from deckchairs to gibbets.
That foul coalition government still makes me think of a spiteful 11-year-old boy smashing an Enigma machine with a mallet, just for fun. Though here I have to confess to the almost indecent degree of pleasure I got from drawing Osborne. This is a common occupational hazard among cartoonists, a weird variant on Stockholm syndrome whereby we fall in love with the public figures we satirise.
We may deplore everything about them, but just love drawing them. With Osborne, it’s not just the weird nose, weak chin and cruel eyes, but the fact he clearly has no bones in his head, his skull replaced by lard and gristle. Then there’s his mouth, ruby red and always in danger of smirking its way round to the back of his neck. And in 2014 he had a makeover and completely changed colour, from spectrum red heavily diluted with titanium white, to a rich, oligarchish raw sienna. Pure bliss.
Theresa May, though, was much more of a challenge. She had been part of the repertory company of characters who populated my cartoons for six years by the time she became prime minister after the Brexit vote. Shoulder pads were the signifier I chose for her, and she had chosen the leopard-print shoes herself (politicians often deliberately provide props for cartoonists; Harold Wilson smoked a pipe in public, but cigars indoors).
However, after she got the top job, I spent a truly dark weekend of the soul trying to capture her to my satisfaction and make her look, in the great cartoonist David Low’s phrase, more like her than she does. But somehow I was never entirely confident I’d “got” her, with my hand up her soul. Then, contemplating an undignified end to my career, I lowered her eye fractionally down her face and there she was. This is the weird, shape-shifting magic of caricature, and I’ve no idea how it works.
It was after her disastrous performance in the 2017 election, and after the Grenfell fire (the most significant political event of the past 40 years if we weren’t too dumb to recognise why) I started drawing her as a ghost, until she finally faded away in 2019, the fourth Tory prime minister to be destroyed by her party’s inability to reconcile its love of global capitalism with its hatred of foreigners.
Johnson I didn’t want to draw at all, just to starve him of the oxygen of publicity. However, like all attention-seeking narcissists, although his skin appears inches thick, it’s actually microns thin, and I know from several sources that he truly hates the way I portray him. Which is heartening, because he appears to pose a challenge to satirists, by doing the jokes himself. In fact, he lands punchlines like the Hindenburg, in his desperate need to be laughed with rather than at. It has been the defining aspect of the pathology he has had in the stead of a political career.
By now farce was repeating itself as farce, on a rapid turnover. I had finally succeeded in truly capturing the essence of Liz Truss – nose like a little chisel, eyes as far apart as is physically possible on a still human skull, and gawky gawping mouth sinking into her clavicle – when she collapsed under the weight of her own contradictions. Then Rishi Sunak. When the Tories were governing exclusively in the interests of the Eurosceptic press, obviously they made a newspaper columnist prime minister; when that ended in tears, they got a sock puppet for the Tufton Street thinktanks, in whose interests they now ruled; after that disaster, as they now only represented the hedge funds that owned them, they gave a hedge fund manager the job. When I first noticed him, Sunak was so immeasurably pleased with himself, I gave him three rows of grinning teeth. I’m not sure yet if they’ll feature much more after next Thursday, with or without him.
Either way, it’s clearly high time that we reestablished some proper demarcation here, that the jokers stick to politics and leave the jokes to us professionals. All in all, we need a bit of boring earnestness, that will eventually, like everything in politics, collapse into comedy gold.
Until then, maybe someone can make a stab at clearing up the mess left by all that Tory slapstick, while we, the cartoonists, sharpen pencils again to depict the fresh meat.
Martin Rowson is a cartoonist and author
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