Minority governments, hung parliaments, multi-party coalitions, unfunded promises, Nigel Farage and the kippers; if this year’s general election campaign has proven anything, it is that widespread political uncertainty – while perhaps not in the best interests of the public – can be a veritable boon for satirists.
“There’s just endless mountains of bullshit, which is a gift for us,” said iconoclastic Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell, who on Tuesday night shared the stage with John Crace, the Guardian’s political sketch writer, at a Guardian Live event hosted by Zoe Williams.
But while the notion that a sorry state of political affairs makes for great satire is so commonly held as to almost be a truism, there’s still plenty of room for the unexpected when it comes to lampooning the political class.
“There are great moments of comedy, most of them inadvertent,” said Crace, who had the day before just about found his sketch being written for him when he was mistaken for an enthusiastic Lib Dem supporter after arriving early to cover a campaign event held for Nick Clegg in Eastleigh.
“The Lib Dem organisers didn’t know who I was, and assumed for a moment that I was a Lib Dem supporter. So I was given the little Lib Dem ra-ra briefing,” he said, going on to relate the absurd dictates proffered by Clegg’s campaign staff on how and when to applaud, and when to hold up the party’s famous diamond-shaped placards for maximum effect as the cameras rolled in.
Indeed, it is not just the unexpected, but the unexpected details that count when your job is to identify – and amplify – the kinds of features, tics and bodily idiosyncrasies that furnish the work of any caricaturist worthy of her or his title. So it is for Bell, who in a career of almost four decades has consistently found ways of rendering the nation’s establishment figures with the kind of shuddering grotesquerie found more often in underground comics than gracing the pages of a respectable daily newspaper. And it is his targets in the current government, most notably the prime minister, that are perhaps his most infamous to date.
Cartoon Cameron
It is fitting then that the human condom, or Bell’s David Cameron, described on the night by Williams as “the stuff of nightmares”, was shaped in the cartoonist’s mind after he noticed one such detail about the prime minister.
“I’d been drawing him as a jellyfish for some time,” said Bell. “Because he used to always go on about transparency … then suddenly during the election campaign in 2010 all of these billboards sprung up with this hideous, impudent, smooth head, and people were saying ‘ooh it’s been airbrushed’, and I said ‘no it’s not been airbrushed’ because you’ve got to see Dave close up: Dave close up is actually totally hairless. He doesn’t have any hair follicles.”
It was at this moment that Bell took the opportunity to let the audience decide for themselves, and used the on-stage screen to display a very candid, very zoomed-in image of the prime minister – a man who for anyone’s money, if the picture was anything to go by, had never troubled a razor in his life.
“So I was trying to find ways of doing it, then this head came up so I just unrolled a condom, and it just worked.”
But what do the politicians themselves think of all of this? Surely these often cruel depictions must get to them? And what about how they feel when the cadences of their speech and their earnest appeals to the public are subject to a ruthless reconfiguration in the daily sketch?
The truth, according to Bell, is that while it is never easy to tell if they can live with it, they certainly can’t live without it.
“You’re paying them an inordinate amount of attention, and politicians obviously thrive on being recognised,” he said. “So it’s perfectly reasonable really, so they accept this filth. The other thing they like is when you do it to their 650 colleagues.”
In any case, both Crace and Bell agreed that the last thing a satirist should do is consider the feelings of their targets too carefully when, in some instances, they may be among a very small number of people able to mount a successful critique of those in power.
“Steve was virtually the opposition during the early days of the coalition,” said Crace, suggesting that Labour was unwilling, or at least unready, to direct any meaningful attacks at the “gloating” Tories in the aftermath of the 2010 election. “There’s a sense of trying to tell the truths that they won’t.”
But just when it seemed as if the night was about to register its first serious note, Crace was quick to acknowledge what might best be described as the satirists’ paradox: “One of the great myths is that we as voters often say ‘please, all we want is politicians who’ll tell us the truth’, but they know that if they tell us the truth we won’t vote for them. So we’re kind of complicit in a locked circle.”
At least we know they won’t be out of the job any time soon.
Sketching the Coalition was a Guardian Live event - our series of events, debates and festivals for Guardian Members. Find out how to sign up.
