As I Please: And Other Writings, 1986-2024
Martin Rowson, Seagull Books, £19.99

ONE of the most celebrated political cartoonists of our age, Martin Rowson has a decades-long written record of equally skilful takedowns of the world’s many hypocrisies and hypocrites, proving to the detractors that cartoonists can write. Shock, horror!

The all-singing, all-dancing Rowson spent 20 years from 1997 showcasing his ready wit in the pages of the left-wing Tribune magazine for its As I Please column — a slot originally occupied by none other than George Orwell in the 1940s. Rowson himself admits to “squatting” in Orwell's column in a June 2003 article marking 100 years since the author’s birth.

But in reality the column — which gave Orwell carte blanche to improvise on any subject he pleased — is the perfect modus operandi for Rowson’s eccentric, offbeat mindset.

A selection of these columns have been unearthed and here they are published together for the first time alongside a collection of his “other writings” across a range of publications from mainstream national newspapers such as the Guardian, to academic journals like the British Journalism Review.

Rowson’s eventful As I Please tenure provides rich pickings for topics as he chronicles the rise and fall of New Labour, the turn of the Millennium, September 11, the Iraq war, the financial crash, Cameron, Osborne and Clegg’s austerity years, terrorism, the Scottish independence referendum, Brexit and Corbynmania.

Invariably his words are as castigating as his cartoons. He rails against everything from the free market and growing climate crisis ("the consequences of unrestrained capitalism mean that we are now heading for an environmental Armageddon entirely of our own making”) to the “people who presume to lead us and our nation … a pack of craven, incompetent, complacent, cruel and callous clowns.”

In an exchange with then chancellor Gordon Brown at Tribune’s 60th birthday party in 1999, he recalls giving Britain’s purse-string holder some economic advice. Rowson suggests he should “ameliorate the condition of the poor as his first priority” to which Brown “smiled winningly the smile you smile at jabbering drunks at parties and replied: ‘Why do you always draw me so fat?’”

Chancellors appear to have been a favourite target for Rowson, who confesses to getting an “almost indecent degree of pleasure” in drawing George Osborne’s “weird nose, weak chin and cruel eyes … the fact he clearly has no bones in his head, his skull replaced by lard and gristle.”

After all, Satire is “speaking truth to power by laughing at it,” attests Rowson and adds “it should only ever punch upwards and never kick downwards.”

As I Please was also an opportunity for Rowson to run with some of his more niche interests, and London Zoo, 24-hour drinking (not to say that he’s either a partaker or an advocate), Syd Barrett and Doctor Who all get a look-in, though politics is never far behind.

On imagining a Dr Who reflecting the government’s vision for Britain, Rowson concludes that they would “probably flog the Tardis to a Qatari-based hedge fund and use the sonic screwdriver to seek out ‘skivers’ and ‘scroungers’.” That was written in 2013. More than 10 years later we have Sir Keir Starmer’s “Britain isn’t working” rhetoric and, given the polls, it seems the irony of Saatchi’s infamous Labour Isn’t Working poster is lost on him.

A number of Rowson’s cartoons are used to illustrate the pieces, including Happiness Is A Warm Banker, originally published exclusively in the Morning Star on November 2010. The ingenious cartoon — made even more so given that it came years before Pig-gate — depicts a pig dressed as a banker cuddling then PM David Cameron while clutching a swag bag with “bonus” written across it.

A Christmas-themed cartoon published in Tribune in December 2002, as timeless as much of Rowson’s work, shows a robin holding a holly leaf and sitting on top of a nuclear warhead chirping: “Peace on parts of Earth and goodwill to some men!”

Some things never change.

This hefty 500-page tome, then, offers a colourful and refreshingly irreverent raconteur’s record on politics at the turn of the millennium and its turbulent aftermath. In the foreword, journalist Kevin Maguire astutely observes that if the pen is mightier than the sword then so are a cartoonist’s brushes.

Rowson is armed with both — to the teeth!