LONDON: The British political landscape is being redrawn with Tony Blair’s departure as prime minister — and the country’s cartoonists are relishing the changing of the guard. Sharpening their pencils with glee at the arrival of finance minister Gordon Brown are Steve Bell and Martin Rowson, two of Britain’s leading political satirists.
Bell, a bearded bear of a man noted for his off-the-wall style and hearty belly laugh, is famous for depicting former premier John Major wearing a pair of enormous, greying underpants, Superman-style, over his grey suit.
The erudite Rowson’s oversized grotesques are in the same vein but easily on the darker side of black humour.
Both view the early days of the Brown era as a new dawn after 10 years of Blair.
“I’m very glad to see the back of him. I’ve been doing him for so long,” said Bell, whose pen has targeted both Conservative and Labour governments in the last 25 years at The Guardian newspaper.
“I’m just looking forward to the change, even if it’s only Brown coming out of the shadows,” he told the news agency.
Brown, 56, has been on the political scene as long as Blair, who Bell has variously drawn as a schoolboy and Bambi before settling on a jug-eared Margaret Thatcher clone with too many teeth and a mad, staring left eyeball.
He does not expect many changes to his exaggerated depiction of the current chancellor of the exchequer as a giant, looming presence, with a jutting jaw, wayward hair and painfully chewed fingernails.
But just like US President George W. Bush, who he first drew as a turkey before settling on a knuckle-dragging monkey with a tiny Blair as his poodle, he will use the cartoonist’s sixth sense to know when something works.
Like Major’s underpants — “a badge of uselessness,” according to Bell — it may have no connection to reality.
In contrast, Rowson, whose cartoons also appear in The Guardian as well as the Independent on Sunday, the Daily Mirror and The Scotsman, sees his Brown as a work in progress.
“It’s always the way when a new figure comes along that, collectively, cartoonists take a while to establish exactly how they are going to do them. It certainly was the case with Blair, then we got the template,” he said.
“The way caricature works is that with a very prominent figure you get a template that adheres to what’s known as the Mickey Mouse protocol, in that you can reduce (him) to three round black circles that are instantly recognisable.” If Blair’s template was teeth, eyes and ears, the “dehumanising” process is incomplete with Brown, but as he becomes more prominent, cartoonists will pick up on what he says and does, he added.
“The thing about Brown at the moment is his enormous heft. He is a huge man,” said Rowson, who is chairman of the British Cartoonists’ Society.
“He’s about the same height as Blair but I always draw him much bigger, a great big looming presence.
“For a while I think we’re going to play on this idea of an enormous man who’s slightly uncomfortable with his enormous body and in trying to play the charismatic politician role.” As for David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader Brown is most likely to face in the next general election expected by 2010, both Bell and Rowson agree that his face is ripe for lampooning.
“He’s got a massive forehead, floppy hair and quite hooky nose and a funny little pouty mouth. It’s all sort of plumpish. Cameron has interesting fat features which you can pick up and run with,” Bell said.
Rowson said the Tory leader’s privileged background provides rich pickings for cartoonists when compared with his attempts to portray himself as an eco-friendly man of the people.
Rowson, who said he abandoned the image of a silver spoon up Cameron’s nose because people thought it was “snot,” now portrays him as an vacuous upper class twit “who bounces around going, ‘hello clouds, hello sky, hello trees’”.
“And it works,” he said.
Some commentators predict British politics, deprived of arguably Britain’s first celebrity prime minister, will be dull because of Brown’s fierce intellectualism and grim-faced apparent social awkwardness.
But for Bell and Rowson, that is not necessarily a hindrance as the spin doctors get to work to create the new leaders’ images.
“That’s why it’s quite good to be cartoonist because you can undermine it.
You’re in a uniquely privileged position to do that, to take all the bullshit they come up with and try and upend it,” said Bell.
“Dullness has a great potential for being funny,” Rowson added.
“The purpose of satire is to laugh at our leaders, or to allow the reader to laugh at our leaders. I think that’s an essential part of the democratic process.
“We need to recognise these are flawed people who may be doing their best, but nonetheless we have the right to laugh at them just as they have the right to run our lives.”—AFP