Rebecca Hendin
The Guardian
This image was from late 2019, when there were big floods in the north of England. There was this huge national emergency, and all Boris could say was “Get Brexit done”. So I just drowned him, right while he was in the middle of saying it.
Other cartoonists love Boris as his hair is such a strong signifier, but I don’t have a preference in that sense. I’m not a caricaturist, I come from an illustration background, and to me politicians are all the same. I’m just happy if they don’t have facial hair, as it takes me ages to draw. I’m not a fan of Boris, though, and that definitely makes it easier to think of funny material.
Sunak is probably my preference for leader, in an artistic sense. He is so small, it will be fun to play with that visually. And I’m small myself, so I don’t feel bad about it.
Chris Riddell
The Observer
I was particularly pleased with this image of Boris, because it is slightly unusual. Around the time of the jubilee, I was thinking back to ’77, the Sex Pistols and God Save the Queen. And it just seemed like a sort of marriage made in hell or heaven, depending on how you see it, to combine Johnny Rotten’s anti-establishment ethos with the current disgraceful incumbent of No 10. As a cartoonist, one is continually looking for metaphors, and this somehow worked as an embodiment of his curious position, his punkish attitude towards the establishment.
Unlike some of the other politicians I have drawn, Johnson doesn’t really have an ideology; he has a cult of personality. He is a man of costumes, whether he’s on the end of a guy rope, or dressing up as if he’s about to drive a forklift truck. So it has felt natural to dress him up in costume, and the costume of a punk rather suited him.
I’ve tremendously enjoyed drawing Boris. I have the ambivalence of many cartoonists, in that I enjoy the more colourful and egregious politicians, and when they go, I feel a pang. It’s often towards the end that you really feel you have captured them. Now I’ll have to do my homework on Rishi’s tiny suits and Liz Truss’s enormous forehead. I met David Cameron once, after he had left office, and it was so surreal: I couldn’t help looking at him as if I’d just drawn him. I dare say, if I ever meet Johnson, I’ll have a very similar feeling.
Patrick Blower
The Daily Telegraph
This ran in the Telegraph in January, when partygate was just getting traction. The Telegraph had been a big supporter of Johnson, but it had started to go quite big on the story. At the same time, The Blue Boy by Gainsborough was in the news because it had been on loan from California, the first time it had been in this country for 100 years. It was a perfect contrast: this rather attractive, fresh-faced young lad in his nice silk suit and then this fat, scruffy man with lax morals.
With the departure of Johnson, cartoonists are in mourning. He really was cartoon gold. One particular thing I found incredibly useful is that he’s one of the very few people you can draw from behind, and you always know instantly who he is. Compositionally that’s a very useful asset, because you can show him from his own point of view, careering towards some kind of disaster. I’ve used that quite a lot.
In terms of the leadership contenders: Liz Truss just looks plain weird, so she’s good. She and Sunak have been on the scene for quite a while, so most cartoonists have perfected them. It sometimes feels like a collective endeavour: we are all chiselling away at the edifice and someone will make a breakthrough; you’ll think, ah, they’ve noticed the upturned lip… there’s always something. We’re all probing, all the time.
Ralph Steadman
The Big Issue
I haven’t drawn Boris much, I didn’t particularly want to. But with a drawing you can do something, without having to explain it. This appeared on the cover of the Big Issue when he was campaigning to be prime minister in 2019. There’s a sort of collage under his collar, with horror images of starvation. Anyone who’s been to Eton has a privileged life, and can’t be completely understanding of ordinary people. Boris doesn’t take their problems seriously. I wanted people to think about whether they wanted a compassionate leader, or someone who is just a “fun guy”.
I gave him a pair of half-hearted horns. One is a horn, the other is more like a growth coming out of his head. They are an expression of the thoughts in his brain. I wanted this head of Boris to look like an explosion. He’s also looking to the side, looking very shifty. I bet he’s wondering if he can break the law, again.
A while ago I decided to move on from focusing on politics. I probably won’t draw Rishi Sunak, I don’t know that it will be worth it. Fifty years ago I wanted to change the world for the better; now it’s worse than it was when I started. At the moment I’m working on a Ralphabet. It’s an alphabet made up of imaginary animals. More fun than politics.
Lorna Miller
The Guardian
This cartoon is a depiction of my own personal horror: I became very ill with Covid, and I didn’t recover. I was worried that some people might be offended by the long Covid zombies, but that’s honestly how I felt when I drew this – like the living dead. I had to find humour in the situation in order to keep going. Drawing took my mind off how awful I was feeling.
Somehow, during the time that I was the sickest I’ve ever been, I produced some of my best ever work. This appeared in the Guardian, but I also did more than 40 cartoons featuring Boris for the Scottish pro-independence website Bella Caledonia. I hope that they might be published as a body of work, to remind people, so we don’t just move on and forget what he did. As a cartoonist, though, I don’t want Boris to go anywhere. He has been the perfect common enemy. I’ve tried to do cartoons featuring Nicola Sturgeon, but I always get horribly trolled online – women always get it worse, and I was the only female cartoonist with a weekly platform in Scotland. I chose to focus on Boris, partly for the sake of my wellbeing.
Grizelda
The New Statesman
I normally avoid doing caricatures, just because I’m rubbish at making people look like who they really are. I tend to focus more on ordinary people and what they are saying about politicians. But with Boris you need no caricaturing skills whatsoever. You just stick on the blond thatch of hair and… bingo.
I realise that some other cartoonists will be sorry to see Boris go. But I have delved down deep into my inner soul and… I’m not at all. He’s become boring now. Everything does, in the end. When Covid came along it was great material for cartoonists, because we were all so tired of Brexit, which had in turn replaced the financial crash and global recession. But Covid got boring, too, and so did Boris. But there’s always something new around the corner to make jokes about.
The Boris image that will most endure is not a cartoon at all, but that photo of him dangling from the zip wire with the union jacks. You see that and you ask yourself, is that really the guy we wanted to lead the country? Hopefully people will learn from the past few years and go for someone sensible next time.
Peter Brookes
The Times
The way Boris used Zelenskiy was so cynical, and so entirely typical of him. He made great play of supporting Ukraine, while actually of course he was using it to hide from everything that was going wrong at home – the fixed penalty notice, and all the rest of it. I was very pleased to find a way of capturing that in this cartoon.
The way I have drawn Boris has changed over the years – partly as a result of how he has changed. Ten years ago, for example, his hair was really quite neat. It was definitely brushed, and even had a parting. At some point it became cool to muss it up. More recently I noticed he was going bald, so I added a bald spot – I don’t know whether he noticed, but it disappeared soon afterwards; he must have started combing it over.
I’ve always drawn Boris with his hair over his eyes, ever since he was mayor of London. I’ve stuck with that, as it played into that idea of him having no vision. I regret it a bit now though, as the eyes can convey expression and emotion.
I’m so glad Boris is going. He became tiresome in the end. A bit like Trump, you can’t really do him better than he does himself. My best-case scenario for the new leader would be Liz Truss, who is so appallingly bad in so many different ways that I’m going to have an absolute feast.
Martin Rowson
Tribune
I did this for Tribune magazine in March 2016, when Trump was first emerging as a presidential candidate and Boris was mayor of London. I realised that they were two cheeks of the same arse. Populist isn’t the right word; they are both clearly narcissistic sociopaths and attention vampires. The only difference is that Trump doesn’t care what people think of him, whereas Boris wants to be liked.
Generally as a cartoonist you think about your subject having three key elements: with Blair it was the teeth, the eyes and the ears. Everyone thinks it’s the hair with Boris, but I realised early on that was not the case: it’s the eyes. His eyes are very interesting: close-set and triangular. When he’s lying he always moves his eyes to the left. When things are going badly for him, he looks awful – the eye bags, the grey, flabby skin.
I’d been hoping for Mordaunt to win the leadership race, because she’s fresh meat. I’ve only drawn her two or three times. Liz Truss is going to be good fun because her chin is going to recede more and more. With Sunak, the benefit is that he’s so tiny, like a little elf. Sometimes cartoonists develop Stockholm syndrome: we fall in love a little bit with our subjects, because they are so fun to draw. I still miss George Osborne. But Tony Blair was my all-time favourite because his appearance degenerated so much while he was in office, and I was able to track that in real time.
Christian Adams
Evening Standard
This was inspired by the first time Johnson took off for Ukraine – little did I realise at the time that it would become a running theme. He wanted us all to think he was a man of the world, but we could all see he wasn’t, really. I like some of the little details in it: the pocket bulging with cheese; the way he looks like a toddler in his party hat, trailing those balloons… because he is a toddler, isn’t he? A toddler dressed up as a grown man.
I’ve been drawing Boris for many years, dating back to his tenure as mayor of London. He’s always had big lips and floppy blond hair, but over the years the lips have got bigger and the hair messier. He’s got fatter, too. When you see him at PMQs it is the eyes you notice. He has very dark, sad eyes – he doesn’t look like a happy man. It’s important to show that, as it’s the bit he wouldn’t want you to see, unlike the hair, which is his trademark.
There’s no denying that Boris has been a daily gift to cartoonists. Liz Truss I’m still finding very difficult to draw, as I haven’t had much practice. I’ve got Sunak down now: he has big ears, like Mr Potato Head, a big nose and big white teeth. Truss is more indistinct; kind of greasy and shiny, like a mannequin.
Ella Baron
Times Literary Supplement
I drew this image for the Times Literary Supplement in 2019, hence the literary reference. It comes from a full-page play on the daemon concept from His Dark Materials: each character has a visible animal incarnation of their soul. So I drew Philip Hammond, who was chancellor at the time, as a stick insect; Theresa May was a dying leopard-print lizard.
Boris’s hair is such a distinctive feature, but I wanted to do something different with it. The evil character in His Dark Materials has a daemon called the Golden Monkey. It fitted so well: Boris is a clown and a joker, but also a golden boy and the Tories’ golden ticket. There’s a shiny facade, but something very slimy underneath. We’ve seen that play out in the past few months; even though this image is quite old, it called him very accurately.
I do like drawing Sunak. He’s slick, plasticky and stiff. For a cartoonist, he’s fruitful territory. Truss I haven’t drawn at all, which is probably telling. I grew up drawing Boris: he was mayor when I started doing cartoons. He’s a big, loud character and always fun to draw. But it will be nice to have someone new to poke at.
