‍It is 9.30 on a Saturday morning and the art editor wanders over, chuckling. David Haldane has sent his cartoons for us to choose from. It is one of the day’s highlights.

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‍The first thing to say is that they are all funny. Now 71, he is a sharp-witted man with a sense of humour that is satirical, sometimes verging on batty.

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‍David, born and brought up in Blyth, Northumberland, has stayed true to his roots. When I was on the Sunday Express he was still living and drawing in the North-East.

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‍He would seldom file fewer than six pocket cartoons for the paper – sometimes more like a dozen – and he was always willing to illustrate a particular story if you asked.

‍Haldane’s wit

‍He once described his work for another employer, The Times, when he would sit down between 3pm and 9pm to produce 25 to 30 cartoons to send to the editor.

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‍“I call it ‘guerrilla cartooning’,” he said, “because you’re weaving around stories that haven’t been sent in yet, so you don’t know what the angle is going to be.”

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‍David’s stablemate at the Sunday Express was Scott Clissold, who likewise was seldom in the office. Scott (the name he signed his cartoons with) lived in Wales and filed his artwork for the leader page spread by email.

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‍He is a superb draughtsman and one of the finest caricaturists around. So good that friends of the Drone’s editor commissioned Scott to sketch him to mark his 20 years at the helm of our online publication.

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‍One Christmas, Scott sent me a signed copy of his 2007 book, Drawn & Quartered. As he says in the introduction, rather than a retrospective of his first decade at the Sunday Express, he focused on “The end of Blair, the Brown takeover, Iraq and the emergence of some Tory bloke on a bike called Dave.”

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‍The drawings of Blair are exquisite: the Toby jug ears, the manic grin, the slightly crossed front teeth. Scott introduces the section on Blair – titled Ta-ra, Mr Blair – with a drawing of the ex-PM as a statue, a rope around his neck, being hauled off his plinth in the manner of the toppled Saddam Hussein.

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‍Being a cartoonist is perhaps the hardest job in newspapers. They need the instincts of a reporter, the talent and skill of an artist but also the wit and humour of a comedy writer. Sometimes they try to make a political point; sometimes they aim to prick pomposity or mock the outlandish.

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‍And they have to do it every day.

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‍Haldane and Clissold are both great craftsmen but the purpose of their work is not at all similar. David’s is a few strokes of the pen to encapsulate a gag, like a one-liner from a stand-up comic.

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‍Scott’s is an attempt to distil the essence of a man with a single, exaggerated feature: George W Bush, whose eyes are too close together, or Gordon Brown, whose face in repose is a scowling, forbidding visage.

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‍In addition, Scott has a serious point to make, albeit humorously. In this sense, he belongs to the great tradition of newspaper cartoonists such as Peter Brookes, Steve Bell, Dave Brown and the peerless Gerald Scarfe.

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‍A perfect example of this art appeared in The Times on Monday. Max Hastings took most of Page 21, the main Comment page, to suggest that President Trump embarked on his Iran misadventure with no real idea of where or how it would end.

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‍Overleaf, on Page 23, Peter Brookes gave us a cartoon with the words “BUT WHAT’S NEXT?” The letter X in next crossed out the face of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who died at the hands of the Americans or Israelis.

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‍It was literally a case of a picture painting a thousand words.

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‍Cartoonists are necessarily of their time. When I joined the Daily Express in 1974, Michael Cummings drew the big political cartoons. Osbert Lancaster sketched the pocket cartoon on Page One and the incomparable Carl Giles drew two cartoons a week for the Daily and one for the Sunday Express (to be collected from his Suffolk studio by taxi and driven to Fleet Street, come rain or shine).

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‍Great though they were – Cummings was the finest draughtsman I ever saw – they were all out of time, drawing a world that no longer existed except in their fertile imaginations. The same could be said of the Express.

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‍Cummings, a convert to the Right, used his cartoons like a sledge-hammer. There was little wit, just lots of labels to guide the reader to the political point or the lame joke. But editors used his skills to illustrate big political Page Ones. He could draw to a headline, both the shape and the sense, which made him a valuable asset.

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‍Osbert Lancaster, a gnome-like figure who occasionally shuffled on to the editorial floor, was a respected theatre designer as well as a cartoonist.

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‍He dashed off drawings of upper-crust characters such as Maudie Littlehampton, a countess, to comment on the news. Many of them were so vague and impenetrable that when they dropped, a search had to be launched to find the story to attach them to.

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‍Giles was with the Express for more than 50 years. He was the paper’s official war cartoonist and entered Belsen concentration camp with liberating troops. Sunday Express editor John Gordon, who brought him to the group, thought he was “a genius”.

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‍Around 1947, he began to draw cartoons around a family that became known as the Giles Family – the anarchist Grandma; Father the skiver; Mother the lynchpin; son George, married to Vera, who is thin and pinched and invariably has the sniffles.

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‍If anyone needed taking down a peg or two, then you could count on Grandma to do the deed. Together, they depicted life and attitudes in the Fifties. His characters lasted much longer, of course. But again, they outlived the times they depicted.

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‍Yes, cartooning is a tough task and there are not many who can sit down at a drawing board bearing a blank sheet of paper and distil the day’s best story into a few wise and witty brush strokes.

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‍*****

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‍Forgive the profanity, but as Kelvin MacKenzie almost said: If this is democracy, my p****’s a bloater.

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‍The Gorton and Denton by-election was notable for the election of a woman plumber representing the Greens, the now routine humiliation of Keir Starmer… and “family voting”.

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‍Sounds benign, doesn’t it? Cosy even. Like a night in watching the telly, everyone cuddled up on the sofa.

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‍In fact, it is election fraud. This is how it works: A man, usually the head of an Asian household, escorts one or more female members of his family into the polling booth and tells them how to vote.

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‍That is illegal and violates the most basic principle of democracy, which is one man, one vote. In other words, you may not decide how your wife, or your sister, or your daughter casts her vote.

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‍That vote is hers alone and not only are you not allowed to hijack it, but – here comes another sacred principle of democracy – it is a secret ballot and you may not even accompany her into the polling booth.

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‍The Democracy Volunteers, an independent election observer group, claims to have witnessed 32 instances of family voting in 15 of 22 polling stations they observed – the highest level they had ever seen.

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‍Given the margin of victory – the Greens’ Hannah Spencer took the traditionally Labour seat with a majority of 4,402 – only Nigel Farage was suggesting that Reform were robbed of victory by poll cheats.

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‍The party’s chair, David Bull, admitted it had no effect on the outcome. But they have reported it to police. We shall see if Plod does anything about it – but probably not, as the reports to police will likely be unspecific, vague and unsubstantiated.

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‍This is not just a democracy issue, though. Men often rule the roost in Asian families and assume that authority extends to deciding how the women will vote. Here, women decide for themselves, so family voting is an insult to the values of our society.

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‍I have thought for many years that our electoral system is far too trusting and laisser-faire. No photographic identity is required. You just turn up with a voting card – which you could have picked up in the lobby of your block of flats – and vote.

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‍If the rules are not followed, as in family voting, no one intervenes. If the electoral officers do not have the power, they should. A police officer should also be present at every polling station so that they can report their concerns on the spot.

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‍Family voting is now barred in Pakistan, which is where the practice came from. So why should it be allowed here?

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‍We must defend our democratic rights and enforce the responsibilities that come with them. We cannot afford to take them for granted. Otherwise, we risk losing the freedoms that took decades, generations even, to secure.

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‍*****

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‍Spare a thought for all those Brits who fled tax-strangled Britain for a new life in Dubai. They include Richard Desmond, former owner of the Express and Star titles.

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‍Desmond once asked those assembled round his boardroom table on the 10th floor of the Blue Lubyanka in Lower Thames Street what they thought of cities such as Dubai as places to live. The replies were not very positive.

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‍Despite this, Desmond got himself a so-called golden visa and bought a place to live there with his family. Typically, such a visa costs you a $500,000 investment in the United Arab Emirates.

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‍I do not know if he was caught out there when the bombs started falling. But if so, I imagine he is now thinking fondly of his old home in dreary old The Bishops Avenue, in Hampstead.

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‍Much less lively. In a good way.

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‍RICHARD DISMORE

‍4 March 2026