In a year in which I’ve drawn too many cartoons about powerful people acting with impunity, the fall of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor stood out to me as a rare win for justice and accountability. Dark humour feels vital to make light of everything that’s going wrong, but I’ve also been trying to draw cartoons that highlight reasons for hope, such as the fragile ceasefire in Gaza or Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York.
2025 has been remarkable not for what I’ve drawn but for what I haven’t. In 40 years of cartooning I’ve never known such an anonymous government, where nobody recognises 95% of the cabinet (apart from Wes “face like a full Brazilian” Streeting). Whether this is down to Morgan McSweeney’s shenanigans or them keeping their heads down until the day the nightmare ends doesn’t matter: it’s a tragedy. The wasted comic potential to be milked from Pat McFadden – dead spit for Death from a Brueghel painting – is a national disgrace.
This year I have drawn Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin more than anyone else. They are not people I want to spend my time thinking about, or looking at – however nobody is beyond satire and they are both sufficiently unpleasant to make a good caricature. I loathe them, but I approach drawing them with curiosity and the eye of analysis. A caricature is as much about the person’s expressions as it is about their features, and while Trump’s face is very active, Putin’s is still: only his mouth seems to move, so I go for his glare.
My aim is to ridicule, to decipher the grins and glares, in order to expose the motivation of those in positions of power. And although I don’t believe cartoonists have the power to bring down governments, I do think we can change the public’s perception of those in authority, and these perceptions can stick. Even so, I am sure it is damaging for the soul to draw Trump so many times – and I am planning to sue for $10bn.
The year has felt a bit like watching repeats of old news broadcasts while being strapped to a dentist’s chair having all of one’s teeth removed. Everything felt painfully familiar, from the unimaginable horrors in Gaza to the continued bloodshed in Ukraine, the ascent of Nigel Farage and “Donald Trump 2.OH-NO”. There were more revelations about (former Prince) Andrew and we even had a Labour government trying to bring back austerity.
The tricky thing for cartoonists was to keep having something new to say in a year that often felt more akin to a recurring nightmare. However, cartooning remains a versatile and effective medium in order to try and capture the heated climate of our current times (both figuratively and literally); distilling the chaos into a single image and trying to squeeze out the odd laugh here and there where we can. By god, we need it!