‘It’s like Where’s Wally in broken Britain’: Ben Jennings on his Tory-era take on A Rake’s Progress

‘A little bit art, a little bit journalism, a little bit comedy’ … Snowflake’s Progress panel IV: King Estates. Illustration: Ben Jennings

Guardian cartoonist Ben Jennings and I stand forlornly before Sir John Soane’s Museum in London as we are told that is it closed. We had planned to see William Hogarth’s tragicomic painting cycle A Rake’s Progress, the model for Jennings’ Snowflake’s Progress – his personal picaresque survey of broken Britain.

Like a couple of ne’er-do-well Georgian fops, we have mucked up – until another journalist generously phones the director, Will Gompertz, who comes down to size us up. The former BBC arts supremo apparently thinks what the hell and gives us a VIP tour of Soane’s atmospheric house.