Martin Rowson draws up a storm

Ken Livingstone made you London’s Cartoonist Laureate. What did that entail? And are you technically still appointed to the role?

That was a sort of stupid joke originally. He and I are both involved in London Zoo, and at a truly weird event in 1999 to celebrate the opening of the new invertebrate house, they invited Margaret Thatcher along to a grand banquet. Ken was then Vice-President of the Zoological Society, and so she at one end of the banqueting suite stood up and made this speech which sounded as though human was a foreign language – she was pretty far gone at that stage – and then he stood up at the other end. I was sitting at the same table and I’d watched him neck about three bottles of white wine, and he stood up and made the most brilliant extemporised speech about conservation I’d ever heard. Then he raised his glass with a, wonderful phrase, “Baroness, I salute you.” I said to him afterwards, “If ever you become mayor, can I become your cartoonist laureate so I can follow you around like a slave in Ancient Rome, whispering in your ear, ‘Stop looking so fucking smug’.” And he said, “Yeah, all right, be a bit of a laugh.” And then he became mayor, and I reminded him, and he said, “Yeah, let’s do it.” And it became quite a big news story, because at that stage nothing had happened since he’d become mayor. He was meant to pay me a pint of London Pride a year. He paid me two or three, then he never got round to paying me any more, so he was five or six in arrears when he ceased to be mayor. I then wrote to Boris to say I have a contract in the bowels of City Hall, and he said, yes you are still officially the mayor’s cartoonist laureate, but get the previous incumbent to pay the balance (which he didn’t). I haven’t done anything for Boris, but what I wanted to do, had he immediately reappointed me, was a picture of him being fucked up the arse by Veronica Wadley wearing a strap-on dildo, just to make sure that he sacked me. I’ve mentioned this to several people including Ken, who said, “You’ve got to draw it, you’ve got to draw it.” ¹

Are you working on any other book projects?

I have an idea for a sort of portmanteau book, a series of graphic short stories, but I want them all to be without words. I rather like the idea of silent comics where just the pictures tell the story. I’ve already done some of these, but I have in my head the graphic plot of somebody waking up and going to an archaeological dig and finding a weird thing and nobody knows what it is, and it’s clear that this person lives in a post- or pre- or non-literate society. So people are talking all the time but there are no words, and through some mistake, from some different dimension, they find something written on a plaque – “Keep off the grass”, or something like that – and they don’t know how to deal with it, and they start astral planing, going to different dimensions to try and see what it means. I just think it would be an interesting exploration of literacy. And I’ve got a great title: The Pen is Mightier Than the Word.

You have of course written a book with only one word in it, so perhaps this is a natural progression.

I’m often asked why I put so many words in my cartoons, and I do find myself using fewer and fewer. Certainly, one thing I thank the coalition for, when they came along I changed my style, I started making the cartoons much more crowded, much more stuff going on in them because it was a coalition and there were more people involved. I deliberately thought, I’m going to make this like the Giles family meets Gillray, so there are these children and puppets, and it’s mayhem. Previously I’d been creating more obviously political cartoons about a specific strategy or policy or whatever. It’s meant in a way to be a kind of disjointed cartoon strip where you don’t know how it’s going to end because you don’t know what the events are going to be. So there is a narrative running through it, and thankfully most of the people who regularly see my stuff do get the recurring characters. Some have said, for instance, “What is that huge furry cup doing there?” “It’s a fur cup.” “Sorry?” “A furc-up.” “Oh, I see!” But it doesn’t matter if they don’t get it, there’s other stuff going on as well.

The whole point of political cartoons is they’re meant to be stupid, they’re meant to be puerile. People say, “Why can’t you be more serious?” I’m not meant to be serious! Or “It’s just schoolboy humour.” What’s wrong with schoolboys? Leave them alone! ²

¹ Wadley, as editor of the Evening Standard was Ken’s arch-critic while he was in office, and subsequently appointed by Boris as a mayoral adviser.
² Of course, there are exceptions to every rule.

Martin Rowson is a multi-award winning cartoonist and writer, a trustee of the British Humanist Association and an honorary associate of the National Secular Society. His work has appeared regularly over the past thirty years in the Guardian, The Times, The Mirror, the Independent on Sunday, The Irish Times, and many other newspapers and periodicals. His books include graphic novelisations of The Wasteland, Tristram Shandy and Gulliver’s Travels, and the memoir Stuff, about clearing out his late parents’ house, which was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. The Coalition Book is published by SelfMadeHero. Read more.
Author portrait © davidxgreen.com

Mark Reynolds is a freelance editor and writer, and a founding editor of Bookanista.

View a gallery of cartoons from the book.