Martin Rowson

Wednesday

Martin Rowson

‘I’m not an ambassador for New Labour, I’m an MP’

From our UK edition

When I came to play back the recording of my recent interview with Bob Marshall-Andrews, the serially rebellious Labour MP for Medway, for a second or two my blood ran cold. As I remembered it, while I’d been drawing him we’d had a wide-ranging conversation about Blair, Brown, socialism, globalisation, MPs’ allowances, the constitution, the judiciary, the media and society at large. But instead of all that my tape started halfway through a long, rambling and very funny anecdote about a hotel where Marshall-Andrews had once stayed in Wales. My contributions, meanwhile, seemed to consist solely of monosyllabic grunts, occasional barks of laughter and increasingly frequent protestations that I must be getting home as I was feeling very ‘tired’.

Saturday

Martin Rowson

I fell helplessly in love with Christine Hamilton

From our UK edition

Scotland had the Macbeths and Romania had the Ceausescus. But while Tony and Cherie made a pretty good stab at it, in the annals of notoriety in British politics no husband and wife team can compare to the Hamiltons. Or at least it seemed like that in 1997, when allegations about cash for questions in brown envelopes catapulted Neil Hamilton, the relatively obscure MP for Tatton, into the eye of the storm about to overwhelm John Major’s government. The decision by the former BBC correspondent Martin Bell, in his white suit, to stand as an ‘anti-sleaze’ candidate in Tatton drove Hamilton’s wife Christine to confront him during a press conference on Knutsford Heath, hurling her into the maelstrom as well, and they duly enjoyed their 15 minutes of infamy.

Wednesday

Martin Rowson

‘Yes! Ha! I’d have been up to the top job’

From our UK edition

For over a decade and a half Ann Widdecombe has been a cartoonist’s dream come true. On top of the way she looks, she’s an avowed virgin endlessly pontificating about sexual morality, a woman politician self-consciously eschewing image self-consciousness and with a voice that could crack a font at 50 paces. For all those reasons and many more, she seemed to be the perfect choice as the first subject for this series of ‘Cartoon Interviews’, in which I’m hoping to pull off a kind of ‘double whammy’ by interviewing the victims of satire while drawing them at the same time. What I’m after is an understanding of how it feels to be on the receiving end of all that mockery, and then compounding it with another nasty cartoon.

Saturday

Martin Rowson

If God proved he existed, I still wouldn’t believe in him

From our UK edition

Martin Rowson just doesn’t buy the ideology that comes with God. Even a personal appearance by the Almighty wouldn’t do the trick, he says The syphilitic atheist German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose career in philosophy came to a sudden halt when he couldn’t stop himself cuddling a carthorse outside St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, believed the death of God was an enormity from which mankind could only recover by willing itself to stand in God’s place. I don’t quite see it like that. Despite the best efforts of warring religions to stake a claim to a universalist monopoly, each one of them has always been part of a teeming multitude of rival ideologies, which include the kind of atheism I believe in and the kind Richard Dawkins subscribes to.