Before he became the Guardian‘s resident editorial cartoonist, Steve Bell was a teacher – a move he calls “one of the worst decisions of [his] life”. He was, in his own words, “bloody useless”, and hated the job. The turning point came when he was hospitalised with an impacted wisdom tooth, and woke up thinking “thank God I don’t have to go to school tomorrow”.
With this revelation he resolved to find work as a cartoonist. His first paid gig was a weekly comic strip aimed at eight-year-olds about a character called ‘Marvin the Mutant’ whose head was on back to front. He drew political cartoons “for love” in his spare time for a couple of years, before landing a regular strip in Time Out in 1979, soon after Margaret Thatcher came to power. ‘Maggie’s Farm’ marked the beginning of his political career, before he began drawing the Guardian‘s ‘If…’ two years later, for which he is best known.
Bell is “fascinated by people”, a trait which lends itself well to caricature. He is incredibly entertaining to listen to; gleefully irreverent, he treads the line between hilariously cutting observation and sharp political comment.
He deals out the insults lavishly: Murdoch is a “bastard” with an “idiot son and an evil wife”; Blair and Brown are “a stupid pair of arseholes” whose bickering helped to tear the Labour party apart; Cameron has “a weird, rubbery persona”. Clegg he describes disparagingly as “an ersatz Cameron… second-hand, with no personality of his own.” Consequently he is often drawn as a cardboard cutout. George Bush, meanwhile, is an oversized ape grasping ray-guns in his long toes. This is one idea that came naturally to Bell: “once I started drawing him as a chimp, everything fell into place.” In his acceptance speech for the UK Press Gazette award for Best Cartoonist in 2004, he thanked Bush “for looking like a monkey, walking like a monkey and talking like a monkey”.
Others do not lend themselves as easily to caricature. Blair, he said, “did not come easily or naturally”, and Bell toyed with several incarnations before he settled on one. His first was as Bambi; but, as he came to realise, “the problem is that Bambi doesn’t have any teeth… Blair has too many”. In later drawings, Blair’s teeth and sharp, angular features become the basis of the caricature, along with slightly crazed, lopsidedly wide eyes reminiscent of Bell’s earlier cartoons of Thatcher. The “mad eye” serves as more than a dig at the former Prime Ministers’ looks, but as a motif to draw similarities between the two on a political level: “There’s a kind of umbilical link between [Blair] and Thatcher, summed up in the eyeball for me.”
The Iron Lady herself was another character whom it took Bell a while to form fully. He is keen to show the audience the squint which became so iconic in his later drawings; one of those distinctive characteristics “you know to be there, even if the camera finds it difficult to capture.” Within a year of her coming to power, Bell had managed to recreate her image perfectly, saying “I was actually quite proud of my depiction of Thatcher. I nailed something about her which was a form of inner psychosis.”
Bell lays into Thatcher’s Conservative party with particular vigour. He describes his first Tory conference like “a gathering of the undead. There was something uncanny about them… Tory audiences have a particular, glazed look about them. They look varnished.”
“It was a very disturbing affair… there was this atmosphere of ‘on to victory'”. By this point Bell had captured the arrogance with which Thatcher was “starting to believe her own propaganda – she started to believe she was invincible.” Following this statement on the projector is a dark depiction of Thatcher crushed by a fallen tree, Wicked Witch of the East-esque, surrounded by onlookers witnessing her demise. “I had no idea she would be gone within a couple of weeks, but as luck would have it…”
Bell’s tone is light-hearted, but not without bite. His satire is pointed and often ruthless in its treatment of politicians. His hatred of Thatcher during her time in power, often used as a punchline during the talk, was genuine. “What she did was so nauseating, tearing up the welfare state… I did want her dead. I hated her.” He describes his despair upon her election, and dubs the time that followed “a five-year slow death”.
Bell has little time for the spin and smooth rhetoric of politicians. The “sort of prattle that comes of political correspondents” is “food and drink” for him. Cameron’s promises of government openness and transparency resulted in him being drawn as a jellyfish. Bell allows us a rare glimpse into the bitterness he feels upon hearing the “cynical, nasty little phrases” used to euphemise tragedy when he shows us an image of Tony Blair and Jack Straw, the then-Foreign Secretary, “coming out of the arse of Bush”. The comical depiction of the former Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary tearing through the fabric of the comically large trousers disguises the horror behind the phrase “material breach”, used to describe an attack in Iraq.
Bell is no stranger to criticism, particularly from the subjects of his cartoons. This does not seem to bother him in the slightest; in fact, he seems to derive a certain amount of satisfaction from hearing that his work makes people uncomfortable. “You’re paying people a backhanded compliment by paying them so much attention… I didn’t want them to like it.”
For Bell, there are few things more galling than receiving a request from a particularly loathsome politician to buy a cartoon in which they have starred – something that has happened on occasion. As political satire, his images are not intended to flatter their subjects. Rather, a negative reaction can be testament to a satirist’s skill.
One such subject is David Cameron. His current incarnation, and one of Bell’s most instantly-recognisable figures, is based upon the observation that there is “something cylindrical about him… something smooth, shiny, sleek.” The natural progression from observation to caricature was, of course, to draw the current PM as a giant condom.
During their first meeting since he began drawing this character, Bell noted that Cameron “does sincerity very well”, seeming only slightly flustered as he asked “so what’s all this about a condom, then?”
Bell retells the story with glee. The second run-in, he remembers, was at “a Spectator piss-up”; the Prime Minister was flanked by an entourage including Rebekah Brooks, whom Bell calls “an evil hag”. Still trying to appear amused, Cameron was visibly more impatient this time as he asked “you’re not still doing that old condom thing, are you?” followed by the somewhat bizarre utterance “you can only push a condom so far…”
By the third encounter, Cameron had all but dispensed with any pretence of joviality. He slapped Bell on the arm by way of greeting and grabbing him momentarily with a grip that was so strong, Bell recalls, that it stung. “He slapped me and said: ‘when are you gonna take that condom off my head?'”
Words: Beckie Smith. Photo: Courtesy of Steve Bell