Book Review: If…Stands Up by Steve Bell

Let me say from the outset that I’ve always been a Guardian reader. At a time when such an admission might be accompanied by ‘tofu-eating Hampstead wokerati’ from certain parts of the right-wing culture wars loony party, I say it with pride. I have always been a Guardian reader.

One of the great joys of being a Guardian reader has been the If… strip by Steve Bell. Every day, Bell managed to distil the news of the day into an acerbic, genuinely funny drawing full of insight, commentary and opinion. From the early 1980s when I first became aware of his work, I have followed his career with admiration and laughter.

In recent years, Bell’s cartoons have gradually disappeared from view. His daily strip was replaced with single drawings on important issues of the day until he stopped appearing. Until his new book If…Stands Up arrived on my doormat, I never knew why his work was erased. I do now.

The book is a hilarious celebration of his recent cartoons from 2018 until October 2023 when the Guardian stopped publishing his drawings (I’ll come to this later).

If…Stands Up is a collection of Bell’s observations of the last five years of political chaos, intrigue and scandal. Whether it’s his caricatures of Trump as a golden toilet, Boris as a giant bum in a blonde wig or Charles’s sausage fingers being anointed with the ‘magic oil of oligarchy’, Bell skewers his subjects with a rapier eye for unrelenting satire not seen since Gillray, Cruikshank and Hogarth. Bell sometimes acknowledges his debt to their legacy by directly referencing their work in contemporary settings. My favourite is his use of Lady Butler’s Scotland Forever (1881) to show the Royals leading the charge of the Light Greys above the banner ‘Royalty, leading the charge against Snobbery, Greed and Racism since 1066’ (some recollections may vary).

This book is full of such gems, illustrating how Bell was fearless in his pursuit of his subjects, showing them to be cynical, self-serving, power-hungry hypocrites.

In 2023, the Guardian dropped Bell following a dispute about one of his cartoons. Bell had worked for the paper for 42 years, drawing more than 4,000 acerbic masterpieces. Along with the increasing absence of Doonesbury, the bottom of the last page of G2 would never be the same. I stopped buying the print version of the Guardian some time ago, and I have to say that its current crop of political cartoonists don’t come anywhere close to Bell’s wit or talent.

In the end, however, Bell pays tribute to the courage of the Guardian for printing his work for so long. He writes: “Only the If… strip ever dared to venture under the skins of the fuckwits who rule over our lives, putting words into their mouths and making them do inappropriate things to explain their fuckwittery, sensitively, tastefully, and in watercolour. Only the If… strip, and only in the Guardian, since I cannot conceive of any other publication ever touching it with a bargepole.”