The general gloom that has settled on British public opinion as the woeful Brexit misery grinds on has stretched our famed national sense of humour to its limits. Yet the best of our political cartoonists have bravely struggled on

The general gloom that has settled on British public opinion as the woeful Brexit misery grinds on has stretched our famed national sense of humour to its limits. Yet the best of our political cartoonists have bravely struggled on

The idea struck me in the middle of last week during the latest round of the joyless proceedings that currently pass for our parliamentary politics. My eye fell on a “Matt” cartoon and my spirits lifted despite the encircling gloom. The drawing showed a couple in their living room, one of whom was reading a newspaper with “Brexit Chaos” splashed across the front page. “When books are written about this,” said the caption, “remind me not to read any of them.”

I laughed out loud. It was then that I realised for the first time that, yes, it is possible to look at the endless protracted political torture to which we are all now subjected – and find it funny.
The political cartoonist shows us the way. It has always been the case. Down the centuries, the political cartoonist has been there to draw the point, to illustrate idiocy and to prove that a picture can be worth a thousand words.

Yet the political cartoon has not always been funny. On the contrary, it has quite often set out to show that a particular set of circumstances is not a laughing matter. But that is not the case with the pocket cartoonist today, and the Daily Telegraph’s Matt Pritchett, with his pithy political precision, is the most brilliant exponent of the modern art of lampooning.

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