Martin Rowson draws a cartoon of Johnson at the exhibition’s launch

WITH his large frame and unruly mop of blond hair, Boris Johnson is one of the most caricatured figures in modern political history. His buffoonish personality has given cartoonists and satirists a rich seam of material, much to their delight or dismay.

However, a week before he flew back for a doomed tilt at returning to Downing Street, an exhibition opened at the Cartoon Museum featuring works on Johnson, during his time as Mayor of London, and through Brexit, Covid 19 and the partygate scandal.

This Exhibition is a WORK EVENT! includes cartoons by dozens of artists and illustrators, including Steve Bell’s famous depiction of him as an arse.

For some like Martin Rowson, the former chair of the British Cartoonist Association and long-time cartoonist for the Guardian, he had been hoping to stop having to draw Johnson for a while.

“I’ve been drawing him for about 20 years,” he said. “He was always the fun clown and the attention seeker. He’s always wanted people to laugh at him. He would take control of the situation, as soon as the laugh happened. He would play with his ridiculous hair to make himself look silly.

“He wanted to become prime minister to get our attention and he achieved that. But at the same time, he hated cartoons because he wasn’t in control. I met him outside a party when he was Mayor of London, I walked over and said ‘Hello Boris, how are you taking to responsibility?’ He said: ‘I mean it’s awful, all these awful people doing terrible cartoons doing this about me.’ He thought people would be doing cartoons about how great and fantastic he was.”

A caricature model of Johnson that greets visitors to the display the Cartoon Museum

The feeling was similar for James Mellor, whose partygate cartoon about “revelling up” is in the exhibition. He said: “Visually I think usually he is an absolute gift. You can draw a very basic chubby figure with a giant mop of hair. He is such an instantly recognisable character, there is a lot of opportun­ities how you can use it.”

The 39-year-old Sunday Telegraph and Private Eye cartoonist said: “On the one hand he was absolutely brilliant and did half our work for us. But I was always slightly aware that he knew he was doing this the whole time and there is always that nagging doubt that you the cartoonist are playing into his own PR image rather than doing my job of mocking him.”

Fred Campbell, a 32-year-old Crouch End-based illustrator has a video playing in the museum using rotoscoping, the animation sequence of tracing over live-action footage frame-by-frame. It was used in Disney’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

His animation shows Johnson doing his press conference telling the public he had been going into hospitals and shaking hands, but it takes a surreal and dark turn as he turns into a skeleton and Professor Chris Whitty’s head swells and turns green.

His normal work is illustration in the early 20th-century style, but anger at the start of the pandemic let him to pick up his pen and start to do his first political cartooning.

“It was borne out of an impotent rage at what was going on,” he said. “I was so angry with this man who was setting the tone for this deadly pandemic in this way. He is a deeply unserious character. It was this dawning reality that he was going to be the one leading us through this. The worst person at the worst time,” he said.

Zoom Rockman’s seaside cutout board of Boris Johnson that was at the Herne Bay cartoon festival

It was all about the personal for Hannah Robinson, 23, who has three pieces in the exhibition – including one depicting life as a final-year student at the University of Edinburgh during Covid. Her grandfather also died during the pandemic. She found out that a Downing Street party had taken place on the night he died in hospital, with family being told they couldn’t visit to say goodbye.

“You’ve got to allow your take and your feelings to feed into your work, if you’re trying to be impartial and not offend anyone then you’re not going to create a good ’toon, if that’s your personal experience and your take then you’ve got to represent that.

“I was really angry, and it’s fair to say that my feelings did really feed into my cartoons.”

The retrospective nearly became a depiction of the present as Johnson’s two-day comeback began. However, despite all saying that the ex-prime minister was the perfect fodder for cartoonists, they agreed they were glad he didn’t return.

Mr Rowson said that part of his downfall was when the jokes, bluster and buffoonery stopped being funny. “It’s like Ceaușescu. The moment the Romanian secret police started to realise they were losing was when the people started laughing during his speech, because he had lost authority. With Boris it is the opposite. When people stopped laughing that’s when he got into trouble.”

James Mellor’s Revelling up

Mr Mellor added: “It was about trying to introduce a few details to puncture that image or that bubble so you are not entirely presenting things in the way that he might enjoy. Downing Street parties – you can’t avoid the subject, you have to cover the parties, but instead of Boris the clown at a party in full swing, you have dejected Boris the next morning among the mess of the party, you take the fun out of it.”

Liz Truss’s brief tenure in No 10 meant that she didn’t have time to gather her own caricature persona, beyond “cheese markets”, odd grins and robots. Rishi Sunak’s prominence as Chancellor meant he’s been cartooned before. Both Mr Campbell and Mr Mellor had ideas of how he might develop his own runaway persona.

Mr Campbell said Sunak reminded him of an “insecure head boy”. Mr Mellor said: “With Sunak it’s the willowy frame, short height, I am sure they are immaculately tailored suits but to me they look a few sizes too small. I was thinking the other day he reminded me of one of those Elf on the Shelfs. There’s mileage for that come Christmas time.”

• This Exhibition is a WORK EVENT! runs until April 16 at the Cartoon Museum, 63 Wells Street, W1A 3AE. Open Tuesday-Sunday 10.30am-5.30pm (late opening Thursdays). 020 7580 8155, cartoonmuseum.org