On Saturday 29th April 2023 The Guardian published a cartoon of mine about Richard Sharp’s resignation as Chairman of the BBC, the top news item the previous day. The main focus of the cartoon was Boris Johnson sitting naked on top of a dungheap holding bags full of dollars, with various wheeliebins around its base, labelled “Patrons”, “Friends”, “Families” and so on. Johnson was saying to Sharp, as the latter was leaving the dilapidated and clearly fire damaged room they were in, “Cheer up, matey! I put you down for a peerage in my Resignation Honours List!”
I think the purpose of the cartoon was fairly obvious - Johnson’s blithe toxicity by association, and how Sharp was the latest bit of blowback from the former Prime Minister’s
casual if all consuming sleaziness and selfishness. None of that, however, seems to have fuelled the furious response to the cartoon. That was all down to how I depicted Richard Sharp.
In the internal narrative of the cartoon, I’d wanted Sharp to play the stooge, the fall guy Johnson had brought low. I also wanted to hint at other parts of the story, and how the networks of croneyism cut every which way among our rulers. It is common knowledge, for instance, that Rishi Sunak used to work for Sharp at Goldman Sachs, the multinational bank infamously described by Matt Taimmi in Rolling Stone in 2008 as “a vampire squid wrapped round the face of humanity”. To signify this not insignificant connection between Sharp and the current Prime Minister, I had him holding a cardboard box, the standard accessory of the just sacked, with the Goldman Sachs logo on it, albeit partially covered by his CV, also held in one of the hands holding the box. The logo’s been crossed out and “BBC” scribbled beneath it, also now crossed out. In the box are Sunak and the aforementioned vampire squid, in a rather cutesy cartoon form, and with the typical yellow polyped skin that stretches between the tentacles of vampire squid.
And this is where things started going wrong. The portrayal of Sharp takes up 3% of the overall image. I was trying to draw him looking silently furious, by implication with Johnson, in the standard caricatural way common to all political cartoons of exaggerating various of his features (most prominently, I thought, his large forehead and rather hooded, baggy eyes). I thought, at the time, it was a fairly mild caricature compared with how I’d draw Johnson. But I’d also never drawn Sharp before, so maybe overworked it to satisfy myself I’d “caught him”; in David Low’s famous phrase, made him look more like him than he does.
Oh, and then I added, just for a laugh as a tiny detail, an empty packet of “Dignity Shreds” at the base of Johnson’s dunghill, with a pig behind an attendant fur cup snarfing a clump of them up.
I like to produce complex cartoons, crammed with incidental detail, partly it allows layers of nuance to be added to the overall umage, partly because it’s the English Cartooning Great Tradition, from Hogarth and Gillray, via Giles and Pont. Also, I know, a lot of the readers enjoy it. But sometimes, like in this case, in the mad rush to cram as much in as possible in the 5 or so hours available to me to produce the artwork by deadline, things go horribly wrong.
Satirists, even though largely licenced to speak the unspeakable in liberal democracies, are no more immune to fucking things up than anyone else, which is what I did here. I know Richard Sharp is Jewish; actually, while we’re collecting networks of croneyism, I was at school with him, though I doubt he remembers me. His Jewishness never crossed my mind as I drew him as it’s wholly irrelevant to the story or his actions, and it played no conscious role in how I twisted his features according to the standard cartooning playbook. Likewise, the cute squid and the little Rishi were no more than that, a cartoon squid and a short Prime Minister, it never occurring to me that some might see them as puppets of Sharp, this being another notorious antisemitic trope. As for the pig and the “Dignity Shreds”, I think I painted them red as like scraps of licorice, again not appreciating they could also be interpreted as blood, repeating yet again antisemitic blood libels that have recurred poisonously for millennia. Finally, fatally, many people assumed the yellow polyps on the squid were gold coins and the truncated Goldman Sachs logo simply read “Gold Sacs”.
For this I apologise, though I’m not going to repeat the current formulation by saying I’m sorry if people were upset, which is always code for “I’ve done nothing wrong, you’re just oversensitive”. This is on me, even if accidentally or, more precisely, thoughtlessly. It’s a personal mantra of mine that satirical cartoons are like journalism, all about Afflicting the Comfortable and Comforting the Afflicted. In other words, I should never attack people less powerful than me (which narrows the field more than you might imagine) and I should only attack people for what they think, not who they are.
So by any definition, most of all my own, the cartoon was a failure and on many levels: I offended the wrong people, Sharp wasn’t the main target of the satire, I rushed at something without allowing enough time to consider things with the depth and care they require, and thereby letting slip in stupid ambiguities that have ended up appearing to be something I never intended. But as I’ve always said, once my work is in the public domain, it no longer belongs to me but to the beholder, in whose eye offence dwells just as surely as beauty.
Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. To work effectively, cartoons almost more than any other part of journalism require eternal vigilance, against unconscious bias as well as things that should be obvious and in this case, unforgivably, I didn’t even think about. There are sensitivities it is our obligation to respect in order to achieve our satirical purposes. Despite the tyranny of the deadline, in future I’ll make sure I’ve drawn what I really mean, and mean what I draw.
Addendum added Sunday 30th April 2023
On Sunday morning, 24 hours after I sent it, someone on Twitter reposted a direct message in which I thanked them for backing me against the growing number of accusations that the cartoon was antisemitic. In that DM I said that offence was in the eye of the beholder, a point I repeated in my apology, written three hours later, but the way I worded it it appeared that I accepted no responsibility. I misspoke. At the time I was still processing the storm I’d inadvertently caused, and to be honest I was in a state of shock as I’d never intended - idiotically, crassly and carelessly - to depict antisemitic tropes. Between that DM and me writing my apology, I fully realised the depth of my mistake.
What I’m feeling now is enormous regret, idiocy and deep shame at the needless upset I’ve caused to people through my thoughtlessness, people I never intended to offend. I also feel shame at my own stupidity in failing to apply the rigour I called for in the apology. As I should.