In my cartoons, the late Queen was always the grounding force in a nation that frequently loses the plot
She may have been a giant in our lives, but I always drew the Queen in miniature.
Admittedly my cartoons are very small (so was she), but people never needed much detail to know it was her. A few lines, that haircut, and you’re done. Has there ever been a more recognisable profile?
We knew little of her behind-the-scenes character, but the sheer fact the Queen had seen so much, and tolerated so many awful people, always without complaint, made her a gift to satirists.
Hapless prime ministers looked all the more hapless next to her reliability. And imagining the Queen’s private reactions was always a joy.
I once drew her doing the Usain Bolt “lighting bolt” celebration pose – mainly because the very thought of it made me laugh.
In another, in 2022, I drew two firemen at their station. The Duke of York was in trouble again; the Duke of Sussex was making headlines; it was all going wrong. One fireman said to the other: “Go and check that Windsor Castle hasn’t caught fire, the Queen’s having one of those years…”
Often prime ministers were involved. In one cartoon, a plaque read, “Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II went up this wall on learning of David Cameron’s revelations.” He had recently suggested that she’d “purred down the line” after he told her of the Scottish independence referendum result.
In the 1990s, I drew a man walking past a newspaper board. “Queen falls off horse – PM not involved,” read the headline. The PM in question, John Major, wrote to me and asked for a print, saying he was delighted somebody had finally realised not everything’s his fault. I think that was my first fan mail.
The Palace even asked for one once. In April 2006, the Queen turned 80 years old, and received some 20,000 birthday cards to open. I marked the occasion with a cartoon depicting two footmen perusing cards displayed on a mantelpiece in the Palace. They were looking at a large example on which was printed, “80! BLOODY HELL!” The caption read, “Nice card from Prince Philip”.
After it ran, a thoughtful reader got in touch to admonish me for being so disrespectful. But then another letter came in, on Buckingham Palace headed paper. Somebody – somebody senior – had asked if they could have the original. Happily, I could send that, then send the aforementioned disgruntled reader a scan of the Palace letter. If it’s good enough for Her Majesty…
Around the same time, I was invited to lunch at Buckingham Palace, along with a small, eclectic group of business and media people. It was my second time meeting the Queen; at the first, years before, I lined up in a room in Windsor Castle with other journalists, and told everybody that my pre-prepared, charming quip was going to be, “Gosh, the ceiling looks much better after it was ruined by that fire…” so they had better not steal it. It was then that Robert Hardman piped up and told me the repaired ceiling is actually in the room next door. Good of him to save me.
I was just as anxious the second time, for that Palace lunch. We all waited in place, nervously anticipating the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh’s arrival. Soon, a fanfare of corgi barks could be heard, then footsteps, then the doors opened. And there they were.
For a moment I was speechless, but soon they just got the room talking, puncturing any tension effortlessly, until we were all having a merry time. I suppose that was one of her many gifts: knowing that everybody who met her was, in some way, having an internal meltdown at the experience, so she needed to subtly relax them – and quickly.
Possibly because of my own meltdown, my memories of that day are like grasping candyfloss. I wasn’t entirely sure what to say (“I love your early work, I’ve got all your stamps”?) or whether I was even meant to ask questions. But we got talking – about shooting, about ducks, about Norfolk, about shooting ducks in Norfolk; and about my grandfather, VS Pritchett, to whom she awarded membership to the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1992.
We know she had a fine sense of humour. Just look at the Paddington and James Bond sketches, or those charming stories about going unnoticed with American tourists. And there must have been so many times in public when all she wanted to do was let out a laugh at how absurd the thing in front of her was.
In private she must have giggled endlessly with the Duke, who didn’t quite share her talent for keeping schtum but did share her sense of humour. In public, though, what she was so good at was just being. So that’s how she most often appeared in my cartoons: the constant, the straight man, the grounding force in a nation that frequently loses the plot. Where do we go from here? We’ll see. But I bet I won’t be short of material…
As told to Guy Kelly
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