© Michael Cross and Matthew Buck Hack Cartoons
The government has announced a short term arrangement for Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin to continue to run the franchise for the West Coast mainline railway after the unhappy bidding process run by the Department of Transport which was originally granted to First Group.
© Matthew Buck Hack Cartoons
The text of the Prime Minister’s speech to the Conservative Party Conference 10th October 2012. The Jimmy Savile revelations also continue and appear to be heading towards his long years of service at St James’s Hospital in Leeds and at Stoke Mandeville hospital in Buckinghamshire.
© Matthew Buck Hack Cartoons
The Labour Party Conference of 2012 is on and long-time children’s entertainer Jimmy Savile has been implicated in a child molestation case.
Held at the Victoria & Albert museum in London. You can read more about the event at the UK Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation blog which I edit.
© Matthew Buck Hack Cartoons
The government’s chief whip Andrew Mitchell (the PM’s midfield enforcer) has sworn at several policemen and called them something far too class conscious for a representative of a ‘Posh’ government full of wealthy former public schoolboys.
It is unclear at the time of writing whether the PM will be able to pull Mr Mitchell back from his position well over the line of public acceptability as John Terry (just retired from international football) famously did at this summer’s Euro 2012 championships.
All such modern media problems are compromised by the politics of the newspapers in the run-up to publication of Lord Justice Leveson’s report. The paper leading the charge on Mitchell and the police is The Sun and their relations with the Police have already been the subject of much conversational and legal scrutiny.
Mitchell’s careless and contemptuous clanger is a terrible goal for the government to concede and there might well still be a sending off which the increasingly knocked-about PM can ill-afford.
The Third Runway © Matthew Buck Hack Cartoons
One of the more eye-catching moves in David Cameron’s reshuffle of early September was the removal of Justine Greening as Transport Secretary. She was long known to be an opponent of the highly controversial ‘Third Runway’ at Heathrow – and this is an issue which has long divided the Conservative party (and indeed, others.)
In Kremlinology, it is also an issue which clearly divides the PM from some of the more obvious rivals inside his own party, notably Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. ‘BoJo’ enjoyed a PR filled Olympics and is another longtime opponent of the new runway at Heathrow. He, instead favours a revival of the old interwar project to build a wholesale new airport off the North Kent coast in the Thames Estuary. Nowadays this idea is known as ‘Boris Island.’
Updated: 6th August 2014. Boris Johnson the mayor of London announces he plans to return to parliament as an MP.
Updated 1st July 2015. The Davies Commission recommends expansion and a third runway at Heathrow.
© Matthew Buck Hack Cartoons
In a shock and impromptu opinion poll at London’s Olympic Stadium, the Chancellor of the Exchequer got a rough reception from the 80,000 strong crowd.
Paul Ryan is the Vice Presidential candidate of the Republican party for this autumn’s Presidential election. You can read the acceptance speech for the role which was given to the Republican National Convention yesterday. It’s created quite a lot of controversy in a not dissimilar way to some of the announcements made by his predecessor in the role, Sarah Palin.
The sketch was quick work from audio visual and drawn on a telephone. It is my first go at the new man on the American political scene.
Addition: 2nd September 2012 – An interesting aside about Congressman Ryan’s relationship to telling the truth. Namely boasting, wildly, about his achievements at running marathons.
Updated – 13th January 2015: My colleague Ann Telnaes has also had a go since Ryan’s elevation to Speaker of the House in the US Congress. Typically, it’s very good, in my estimation.
