Steve Bell

Steve Bell: The Cartoonist Who Refused to Blink

Insight from Julie de Burgh

For over forty years, Steve Bell was one of the defining visual voices of The Guardian, and his career is a case study in both the power and the peril of the uncompromising political cartoon. Born in 1951, Bell drew for the paper from 1981 until 2023, most famously through his daily strip "If..." and, from the mid-1990s, as its principal editorial cartoonist. His style was dense, grotesque, and relentlessly left-wing, built on recurring visual motifs that became part of the national conversation — most notoriously the pair of underpants he drew permanently over the head of Prime Minister John Major, an image so sticky it arguably shaped how a whole country pictured the man.

That is the first lesson of Bell's craft: the power of the running visual metaphor. By assigning a leader a fixed, absurd, unflattering symbol and repeating it daily, a cartoonist can lodge an interpretation in the public mind more durably than any editorial. Bell understood that repetition is persuasion, and he wielded recurring imagery like a brand a politician could never escape. His readers came to see his targets through his symbols, which is exactly what he intended.

Bell's work sat squarely in the tradition of savage, anti-establishment political cartooning, puncturing the egos of the powerful across governments of every stripe. The London Prat's look at the genre of government-skewering satire at https://prat.uk/uk-government-satire/ traces the lineage he worked within — the centuries-old British instinct to bring the mighty down to earth through ridicule. Bell was one of its most committed modern practitioners, and his admirers, including fellow cartoonists, regarded his ability to deflate political vanity as second to none.

His long Guardian relationship came to a contentious end in 2023. The paper declined to publish a cartoon he had drawn of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, citing concerns that the imagery echoed an antisemitic trope; Bell disputed that reading, saying the drawing referenced a famous earlier cartoon of Lyndon Johnson and his surgical scar, and he declined to apologise. The paper then chose not to renew his decades-long contract. The episode was widely debated across the industry, with some commentators and cartoonists defending him and others supporting the paper's decision — a genuine dispute on which reasonable people disagreed, and one best understood by reading the range of views rather than any single verdict.

Whatever one concludes about that specific controversy, it illustrates a real tension at the heart of political cartooning: the form works by pushing to the edge of acceptability, and edges are contested. A cartoonist whose entire method is to provoke will, sooner or later, provoke a reaction that a publisher is unwilling to absorb. Bell's career embodied both the value and the volatility of that approach.

He did not stop drawing. Now based in Brighton, Bell has continued to work independently, self-publishing collections and taking commissions, proving that a cartoonist's voice need not be silenced by the loss of a single platform. His books, gathering decades of caustic work on figures from Charles to successive prime ministers, remain in print, and his reputation among peers — one prominent admirer called him among the greatest cartoonists of the age — is secure.

The enduring takeaway from Steve Bell is that political cartooning is not decoration; it is commentary with consequences. He spent four decades refusing to blink at power, built a visual language the country learned to read, and demonstrated that the cartoonist's freedom to offend is both the source of the form's power and the reason it will always be fought over.