‘Yes! Ha! I’d have been up to the top job’

Martin Rowson

28 June 2008

In the first of an occasional series, Martin Rowson interviews Ann Widdecombe while drawing her at the same time. But this two-pronged satirical strategy does not faze the cult Tory

Even so, I suggested, she must occasionally feel hurt by them.

‘The only time I’ve ever been upset by a cartoon, and it wasn’t about me but a policy, was when I proposed housing all new asylum seekers in secure reception centres, and the Independent did a cartoon of a reception centre in the form of Auschwitz. And that was not my policy. And that is the only time I can ever remember being upset by a cartoon. I’ve certainly never been upset by a cartoon of me.’

But it’s not just cartoons that have the power to upset. How had she felt about the Daily Mirror’s headline description of her as ‘Doris Karloff’ when she was prisons minister? To my dismay she laughed when I mentioned it, but pressing on I said she must have felt just a tiny little bit hurt by that.

‘The way I dealt with Karloff was straightforwardly, the next time I was phoned by the press, to take the call and say, “Karloff speaking!” What you’re supposed to be is hurt or upset or angry, but what you’re not supposed to be is participating in the joke.’

Which is pretty obvious, really, though I know many politicians, and more journalists, who’ve never learned this useful life skill. Even so, you’d be scarcely human if it didn’t just occasionally, merely by a process of erosion, slightly upset you. Particularly if, like Widdecombe, you’ve eagerly embraced the media in an almost Faustian pact. After she’d explained how her media profile gave her opinions access to a massive audience — ‘I got four million viewers for a programme I made recently about benefits, and I’d have got 40 or so, if that, if I’d made a similar speech in the Chamber’ — I mentioned her recent encounter with the comedian Jimmy Carr on Have I Got News For You, after which she wrote that, ‘his idea of wit is a barrage of filth and the humour most men grow out of in their teens’.