An era of tragedy, cruelty and burlesque: what it was like to draw those 14 conservative years | Martin Rowson

FOver the past five weeks I have been told repeatedly, “You must be really busy!” » I had to explain that elections are not like that. In fact, from a designer's point of view, they're boring. The only real fun is when the party's cogs go haywire and their careful choreography turns into farce. But in this election, even the conservatives' serial errors are becoming tiresome, and only serve to remind me of the universal truth that reality will always, always be stranger than anything satire could imagine in a million years. years.

That said, in the empty hours of that interminable wake as we waited for the Tory mass grave to finally be led to the guillotine, I reflected on the last 14 years and how the worst government of my lifetime was replaced five times by one that was even worse.

Take David Cameron, Britain’s first ever sabbatical prime minister, whose congenital complacency and natural sense of entitlement had already endowed him with an unfathomable depth of risk. Since he was elected Tory leader, I had drawn Cameron as Little Lord Fauntleroy, with an added touch of Basil Fotherington-Tomas. It is always better to go for the obvious joke. (Last year I visited an exhibition of the nine prime ministers I have been paid to draw for over the last 42 years. When I get to Cameron I show a slide of a mortadella sausage. Some punters think this is a reference to his complexion but in reality it is about Luis Buuel’s claim that Benjamin Pret’s belief that mortadella was made by blind men was the ultimate surrealist statement until Cameron attacked the children looting TK Maxx during the 2011 riots for having too great a sense of entitlement or maybe it was Boris Johnson, yet another Old Etonian using our country as his personal park. Either way, Irony’s corpse hit the pavement screaming.)

Then, because Cameron's charm (George Osborne described him as the Tories' secret weapon) conspicuously failed to secure a majority against Gordon Brown's crumbling Labor government, his comic potential was massively increased by the forced coalition with the Liberal Democrats. I admit that in the middle of the 2010 election campaign I still couldn't draw Nick Clegg, because until now there wasn't really a reason to.

However, when I watched the first leaders' debate (the one that gave rise to Cleggmania), I saw that he had a very tilted head and was physically a strange amalgam of Private Pike from Dad's Army and Pinocchio. I opted for the second trope, the little wooden boy who wanted to become a real politician. Readers caught on instantly, and for five happy years, Cleggnocchio was sawed into pieces, dismantled, then reassembled in all manner of forms, from deck chairs to gibbets.

This filthy coalition government still reminds me of a spiteful 11-year-old boy smashing an Enigma machine with a mallet, just for fun. But I must confess here the almost indecent pleasure I took in drawing Osborne. It is a common occupational hazard among cartoonists, a strange variant of Stockholm syndrome that makes us fall in love with the public figures we caricature.

We can deplore everything about them, but we love drawing them. With Osborne, it's not just the weird nose, weak chin and cruel eyes, but the fact that 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 all the way to the back of his neck. And in 2014, it got a facelift and completely changed color, from specter red heavily diluted with titanium white to a rich, oligarchic raw sienna. Pure happiness.

Theresa May, however, presented a much greater challenge. She had been part of the repertoire of characters that had populated my cartoons for six years by the time she became prime minister after the Brexit vote. The epaulettes were the symbol I had chosen 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 like, in the words of the great cartoonist David Lows , more hers than she is. But somehow I was never entirely sure I had her, with my hand on her soul. Then, contemplating an undignified end to my career, I looked down slightly at her face and there she was. It's the strange, shape-shifting magic of caricature, and I have no idea how it works.

It was after her disastrous performance in the 2017 election and the Grenfell fire (the most important political event of the last 40 years if we weren't too stupid to work out why) that I began to draw her as a ghost, until she finally disappeared in 2019, the fourth Conservative prime minister to be destroyed by his 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 deprive him of the oxygen of publicity. However, like all attention-seeking narcissists, although his skin appears a few inches thick, it is actually a few microns thin, and I know from several sources that he really hates the way I portray him. Which is encouraging, because he seems to pose a challenge to the satirists, by making the jokes himself. In fact, he lands punchlines like the Hindenburgin his desperate need to be mocked rather than ridiculed. This was the defining aspect of the pathology from which he suffered instead of a political career.

Now the prank was repeated like a farce, with a quick twist. I had finally succeeded in truly capturing the essence of Liz Truss's nose like a little chisel, the eyes as far apart as is physically possible on a still human skull, and the gaping mouth sinking into her collarbone as she was collapsing under the weight of her own contradictions. . Then Rishi Sunak. When the Tories governed exclusively in the interests of the Eurosceptic press, they obviously appointed a newspaper columnist as prime minister; when it ended in tears, they got a sock puppet for the Tufton Street think tanks, in whose interests they now ruled; After this disaster, as they only represented the hedge funds that owned them, they gave the job to a hedge fund manager. When I first noticed him, Sunak was so pleased with him that I gave him three rows of smiley teeth. I'm not sure yet if they'll appear much more after next Thursday, with or without him.

In any case, it is high time that we re-establish some demarcation here, that the jokers stick to politics and leave the jokes to the professionals. All in all, we need a bit of boring seriousness, which will eventually, like everything in politics, turn into comic gold.

Until then, maybe someone can try to clean up the mess left by all this conservative nonsense, while we cartoonists sharpen our pencils again to depict fresh meat.

• Martin Rowson is a cartoonist and author

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