Coalition cartoons – harmless fun for the Lib Dems?
Peter Brookes of The Times has him as a public school fag to the swaggering Bullingdon members, Cameron and Osborne.
Steve Bell at The Guardian, after a brief experiment with portraying him as Private Pike from “Dad’s Army”, has been dabbling in Millais’ Bubbles painting and an elf, nearly always a diminished figure living in the coalition senior partner’s shade.
(‘Abandon all hope’ by illustrator Gary Barker – see more cartoons sent in by Channel 4 News viewers here)
Martin Rowson, whose cartoons appear in The Guardian and The Observer, has settled on Pinocchio – the Clegg wooden puppet is often dismantled by the sadistic Tory coalition partners to be reassembled (as a football rattle or a flagpole). All good fun? Nothing to worry about for the deputy prime minister?
Well, in the last few weeks I was struck by the number of Liberal Democrats in parliament who spontaneously brought up in conversation how worried they were about the images that the cartoonists were embedding in the public consciousness (and in the minds of their party activists).
The Guardian has long been the paper of choice for Lib Dem activists. There was elation in Lib Dem ranks when it dropped Labour and backed the Lib Dems in the election. But coalition with the dreaded Tories has changed that for many on the paper, and even before you get to the editorials, the cartoons tell you the brief fling seems to be over.
The Independent, Lib Dems feel, has turned against them – the cartoonist had David Cameron riding a Clegg “Brokeback Mountain” horse this week.
The first Lib Dem leader, David Steel was mocked powerfully by 3-D, latex cartoons in the Spitting Image series, shown as being in the pocket of the swarthy, smooth and dominating David Owen.
In our report tonight David Steel says he fears something similar could be happening to his successor, the deputy prime minister.
The deputy leader of the Lib Dems, Simon Hughes, tells us Nick Clegg knows he has to work on breaking out from the image. Hughes said he feels the cartoonists will change their tune if the leader and the party can start portraying itself more as a gang within the coalition, not just a junior part of the beast.
But is the damage already done? And isn’t this, surely, with the pain still to be delivered, as good as it gets?
Steve Bell of the Guardian and Martin Rowson of The Guardian and The Observer tell us it’s “tough” if the Lib Dems don’t like it – or, as Steve Bell says, “tough titty”.
We portray Nick Clegg as “gullible and manipulated”, says Rowson, because you’ve done nothing to suggest you’re anything else.
For decades the Lib Dems longed to get profile. With it comes recognition, caricature and mockery. If their coalition is “strong and stable” as promised, there will be years and years of the stuff, and it rarely gets nicer as time goes by.
Fancy yourself as a cartoonist? Drawn your own cartoon of the coalition? Send it to us on news@channel4.com
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