Matt Buck’s Hack Cartoons Diary

A leaving party image for the Prime Minister.

This mornings leaked email from Downing Street which turned up in The Mirror newspaper really puts an interesting light on what is going on inside the government and the Labour government.

Here’s a quote from the document refereing to the chancellor, who remains TB’s likeliest successor …

“There are specific issues which can provide opportunities and threats. They are: GB’s reaction … the more successful we are the more it will agitate and possibly destabilise him, we need to consider how to deal.”

Giving Tony a big and prolonged send-off would certainly irritate Gordon no end. It is also why this row will not go away until the PM either names a date (Gordon’s preferred solution) or actually goes.

In cartoon commentary land this leads to extreme exhaustion of Gordon and Tony jokes – although I thought Martin Rowson found a good one yesterday on the Guardian.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/martinrowson/archive/0,,1284262,00.html

I’ve been thinking about entering this excellent web-based communal activity for ages – the thing that tipped me over the edge this week was the theme – run.

On days I’m not feeling too old, too tired or too cranky – this is one of my favourite things.

The caricature is of Paula Radcliffe.

Caricaturing is extremely difficult to do well and I find it really helps to be interested in the person you are doing. I worked hard on drawing Paula over a long period, and came back to the image several times having tried various ways to do her.

The trick in this case seemed to be finding the right moment at which to draw her. The solution was suffering, after all it’s what she does best.

Well, revenge has been meted out for my appalling behaviour towards my father’s IT-related troubles.

My printer died.

To be fair, it had given good service (thankyou HP) and was a lot more reliable than the succession (I never learned) of Epson models I’d had before.

On the good news front, the laptop doesn’t need a battery recall (phew) and touch wood, nothing else appears to be broken at present. Apart of course from my will to draw anything about the news.

Below, something commissioned on the middle east (again)

Modern life has caught up with me, my father has become a blogger.

Lyn and I are delighted he’s managed to join the digital world having spent part of last weekend trying to sort out various of his computer and IT related problems.

I’ll list a few – How to fix the fax, how to insert footnotes in his thesis, how to switch on his email without going through two, or perhaps three corporate portals and so on.

All of these are issues which the three of us have battled through before!

Amazingly however, when motivated to learn something new that he is interested in, he’s off like a hare – and thus, I give you, my father, the blogger.

http://bucksnotes.blogspot.com/

Things have been a little serious on here lately, so here’s something light and frothy.

Britain is experiencing a shortage of sperm donations.

This is due to a change in the law that means donors now have to reveal their identity so that any children resulting from their generosity, can one day trace their biological father.

Coincidentally, Channel 4 are about to launch their annual ‘controversial week’ in the summer schedules – happily, for this cartoonist, this year it’s about wanking.

When captions write themselves …

Behind the renewed fighting in Lebanon lies an old problem about the balance of power across the region.

Israel is the major military power, funded, backed and supported by the US and with access to its own nuclear weapons.

The other major power is Iran, which has become massively more powerful in relative terms, since the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Iran is also busy constructing a large scale cilvilian nuclear program, which it is hard to believe won’t also be useful in military terms. The US, the EU and the UN are very concerned about this and there has been a long-running argument about how much of a project Iran should have.

It’s not hard to think that a lot of what is going on in Lebanon is a handy diversion for Iran, and a useful way of strengthening their hand in the ongoing nuclear discussions. Every time they poke Israel – and that it responds – it strengthens anti-Israeli feeling across the region and makes life difficult for Iran’s major enemy, the US.

And the US, let us not forget, is sitting on the borders of Iran with a large army, having invaded the Iranian’s neighbour, Iraq. Confused yet?

Well some signs of progress this morning – and an age-old cartoon experience, the news overtaking you.

Yesterday’s drawing is now out of date. Clearly the TV pictures of Qana have moved the Americans to do something and there is now somesort of temporary cessation of Israeli air activity over southern Lebanon, even if both sides are still firing artillery and missiles at one another.

The challenge now is going to be getting agreement about how to secure a permamanent ceasefire, because this isn’t it. Two from a large range of difficult issues that this is going to bring to light are; how to disarm or control Hezbollah and how to bring an international force in the area without making it look as if it’s another western invasion of Arab land.

A visual response to the major humanitarian disaster at Qana in southern Lebanon where 50 people, largely women and children have died after a building collapsed on them following an Israeli bombing raid.

I chose to draw this in a sort of triptych – or three panel display – to try and show the inconsistency in the position of the American administration, which still likes to pretend it is a neutral power broker in the region.

Sadly, in other news this week, it has become clear that the bunker busting weapons, perhaps responsible for these deaths, are currently being shipped to the Israeli airforce from the US, via the UK.

Needless to say, the idiots in Hezbollah are still firing missiles at the Israelis.