I had started on this spoof combining the Mark Thatcher and Harry Windsor stories. You know the sort of thing:
“So, Mr Thatcher, this was an ironic coup?
Well, yah, we’d a bit to drink and a couple of chums had dressed up in fatigues for a party and one of the fellas—an old friend from the club—asked me if, y’know, he could borrow my helicopter for a bit of a wheeze.”
etc. etc., then Norm posted about this Steve Bell cartoon in The Guardian and I felt dirty somehow by association with the unfunny, one-note waste of wood-pulp that Bell has become, so I gave up.
UPDATE: Norm actually intended to (and now does) link to this one-note, unfunny, waste-of-wood-pulp Bell cartoon.
What’s happened to Steve Bell is absolutely tragic – he was once one of the most gifted cartoonists we’ve ever had, but now is as you describe him. He should be counted as a casualty of the war.
He was never the same after his “underpants” phase had ended.
Stop trying to pin the blame on Blair. 😉
The whole poli-toon genre is dying in a rather ugly fashion. Very few left with even a hint of understanding as to what is going on, and fewer still with something worth saying about it. Most toons look something out of a grade schooler’s notebook margin, and have about the same level of thought behind them.
Oh come on, Steve Bell is still a killer. Its just that those who
suck up to New Labour know longer get the joke.