Strip teasing
Above: Chris at his studio in Brighton
Above: Shadow boxing (2007)
Above: Santa special (2007)
Above: Flights of fancy? (2006)
Above: The ghost of premierships past (2005)
HE MAY be the triumphant Mayor of one of the world’s greatest cities, but to Chris Riddell, the Sussex-based political cartoonist, Boris Johnson looks like... a yeti.
“I drew him the other week, just before the London mayoral elections, and to my mind he looks like a galumphing Abominable Snowman,” he says. “The caption read something like: ‘Abominable, yet he might just win.’ Yet he, yeti – get it?
Riddell has been drawing blood as The Observer’s political cartoonist for 13 years now, fearlessly pricking the pretensions and absurdities of our public servants. Did he really depict Tony Blair popping out of President Clinton’s trousers? Yes, I’m afraid he did.
The changing political scene, of course, brings a fresh clutch of potential victims and Riddell’s vivid imagination wastes no time getting to work.
Michael Howard was vampyric. William Hague had to have short trousers. And then there’s that yeti-like Boris. But you can’t force it, he says. Take Gordon Brown. You could dress him up as a cowboy and hope he becomes synonymous with it, but it never works that way. It has to be grounded in truth.
But sometimes, of course, the truth hurts. Indeed, such was the impact of the Blair cartoon that someone at No 10 – he’d like to think it was Alastair Campbell – rang his editor to protest in the strongest possible terms. Needless to say, his boss merely trotted over to his desk to offer his warmest congratulations.
Riddell works his magic in a converted coach house tucked away at the bottom of his garden near Preston Park in Brighton. Like most artists’ studios it’s satisfyingly chaotic, strewn with papers, brushes and bottles of ink. Behind him, at an opposite desk, works his artist wife Jo Burroughes, who produces exquisite botanical paintings in acrylics and oils.
“We were at Brighton Polytechnic together and we’ve shared a studio since before we were married,” he says. “I bounce ideas off her all the time and rely on her to give me a second opinion.”
It’s a rare glimpse at the chink in his armour because Riddell, a bear-like man with a natural facility with words and an educated, authoritative speaking voice, strikes me as supremely self-assured and unflappable.
He is also immensely focused and self-disciplined, a necessity given that he straddles not one but two disciplines. He may be a merciless political cartoonist on Sundays, but for the remainder of the week he’s an award winning children’s writer and illustrator, best known for the popular fantasy series, The Edge Chronicles, which he illustrates and co-writes with Brighton author Paul Stewart.
Some might consider politics and children’s publishing odd bedfellows, but Riddell disagrees.
“There’s a great tradition of children’s book illustrators being cartoonists and vice versa – everyone from John Tenniel (who illustrated Alice in Wonderland) back in the early days of Punch, to EH Shepard (Winnie the Pooh), Ronald Searle and Ralph Steadman.”
What’s more, he adds, his personal tutor at Brighton Polytechnic was Raymond Briggs – famous not just for The Snowman, but also for his caustic Falklands nursery rhyme, The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman. Besides, politics was as natural a subject as Little Red Riding Hood on Riddell’s nursery floor.
He was born in Cape Town in South Africa and his parents were active in the anti-apartheid movement (his father was an Anglican priest). They moved back to Britain when Riddell was one, but the issue was invariably South Africa when he was growing up. “When everybody was discussing the Winter of Discontent, we’d be discussing the Soweto riots.”
He discovered a talent for drawing when his mother loaned him coloured pens to stop him fidgeting during his father’s sermons, and he’d spend hours writing and illustrating his own newspapers and comics.
He began producing children’s books in 1984, then landed a job on the ill-fated Sunday Correspondent where his first subject was the handover of Hong Kong to China. When the paper folded, he joined the Independent on Sunday and then, in 1995, The Observer.
He’s had the good fortune to chronicle momentous times – from the collapse of Communism and the emergence of New Labour to the rise of terror and anti-terror. But inevitably it’s the big beasts of the political jungle which have absorbed him most, and the current batch proves no exception. What does he make of Brown? “He’s a good subject. He has weight and gravitas, and I don’t just mean physically. In actual fact, he isn’t a particularly big man – it’s just that his persona makes you want to emphasise those qualities.
“His hair is definitely greyer, though, even if it isn’t sculpted into quite such an immovable style any more, and is gradually beginning to soften.”
So have the image-makers been at work? “Inevitably. He’s married to a PR person, so she’ll be picking out his shirts and telling him when he needs a haircut.”
He’s met Brown and Blair at several public functions, the former at a children’s book event at Number 11 while he was still Chancellor. “He shook my hand and gave me that smile. He’s more natural face-to-face. But then, I didn’t introduce myself as a political cartoonist or that smile would have frozen.”
Blair, of course, was similarly fertile ground for Riddell’s scabrous pen, although, looking back, he says you can trace the way the cares of office took their toll.
“My first Blair was thin-necked with big ears in a huge double-breasted suit. But he ended up in Iraq, knackered and knock-kneed, and bearing that rictus of death. The transformation happened almost overnight. I trace it back to the beginning of the Hutton Inquiry when suddenly the hair seemed to thin, the creases started to appear and he got his spectacles out for the first time.
“Of course, it was the big decisions he was making about going to war with Iraq, which was a war too far. I supported him over Kosovo and Sierra Leone, but Iraq was a huge mistake and his political career has been defined by it.”
Over to the right
Conservative leader David Cameron also provides him with plentiful ammunition. “For a start, he’s got that colourful old Etonian past. And then there’s that big, open, featureless face, which reminds me of the dish that ran away with the spoon. It’s the perfect subject for caricature because, like Blair when he was leader of the opposition, he’s at the beginning of his project and there’s a distinct sense of lack of substance.”
He rarely gets the chance to lampoon foreign leaders because domestic issues dominate the Sunday leader pages, but when the moment arises, he grabs it with both hands.
In 2005, he drew President Bush being flushed down the toilet pan – “Well, he had to excuse himself from some summit to go to the bathroom, so it seemed appropriate”. And he capitalised on Blair’s edgy relationship with Jacques Chirac, the former French president, by depicting them hugging fraternally while each held a dagger behind the other’s back.
The new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, hasn’t got away scot-free either and during his recent visit to the UK Riddell portrayed him as a rooster, with his glamorous wife Carla Bruni doing a fan dance with his tail.
As you might have gathered, Riddell, who works in the great Punch symbolist tradition, keeps a vast menagerie of animals up his sleeve (other favourites include the Russian bear, the American eagle and the Chinese dragon). He loves these strangely outmoded symbols, although he often adorns them with contemporary references to Big Brother, iPods or celeb culture.
If he was to define his approach, he says, it’s to inject visual subtlety. “I wouldn’t characterise myself as one of the savage satirists who try to destroy people, but it’s very nice to be incredibly rude with a genteel style.”
Riddell produces his cartoon on site at The Observer every Friday, believing it’s critical to soak up the culture of the paper and be a part of it. The ideas begin fermenting as soon as he jumps on the London train. “Always – without fail – an idea forms between Haywards Heath and East Croydon. Then from East Croydon to London Bridge I write the caption, cross it out, write it again, and so on.”
At the office, he heads straight to the editor with his sketch and waits for the nod. “Even if you only get to speak for two minutes at morning conference, it’s essential that you put your cards on the table and say: ‘Here’s what I’m doing.’ That way, you avoid telephone calls at 3pm saying: ‘I really don’t think you should be drawing this...’”
What you should never do is ask the editor for his ideas, he says. That way madness lies.
Then, finally, he gets down to it, working in ink before adding the colour wash and gouache highlights. He prefers a fine, soft brush to a hard nib – “more fluid” – and always dries his work with a hairdryer which he keeps in the drawer.
More mighty than the sword?
What influence do he and his fellow cartoonists hold over Westminster or, indeed, society at large?
He snorts. None whatsoever, although when he drew a particularly coruscating cartoon of Blair during the latter years of his premiership, Labour backbenchers would occasionally pick up the phone and buy it. Besides, he says, cartoonists should never make the mistake of taking themselves too seriously. They’re just there to blow a raspberry every so often.
“The Observer held a retrospective exhibition of my cartoons earlier this year and I suppose that was an attempt to take stock and put things in context, but, generally speaking, my instincts are against that retrospective take. My significance is when someone opens the paper on a Sunday and looks at it for a couple of seconds. That’s it.”
Books, of course, are a different story and children regularly turn up at his book signings with copies of his titles that he’s long since consigned to history.
A prolific writer and illustrator, next year sees the publication of the tenth and final volume of The Edge Chronicles, which have now sold more than two million copies worldwide. It also marks the publication of the third in his award-winning trilogy about a girl private detective called Ottoline, not to mention a lavishly-illustrated version of the Spanish classic Don Quixote.
So what drives him? He has nothing to prove because he’s won every gong going and he can’t possibly need the money
The fact is, he admits, he just can’t help himself. “I feel it’s serendipity to stumble upon the one thing I absolutely love and get paid for it. And one of these days I’m going to wake up and find I’m not an illustrator at all – and I’m going to have to get a real job.”