Rayner, “pint-sized” Rishi and the trouble with body politics

Angela Rayner stands taller than most in my political blind spot, and I don’t just mean because of her predilection for high-heeled boots. So much about her is familiar. For me, at least, she is a welcome addition to the political space. She’s a working-class northerner (like me) and has a noticeably strong accent (a bit like me). She also comes from a background working as a carer (a role I’ve been repeatedly forced into over the last few years) and, when she speaks, it feels like I’m listening to so many people I’ve known. She sounds like people I meet every day. 

Much of that might not mean much to you. You might know more people who sound and act politically in the way that most of Westminster sounds and acts politically. But I don’t meet those people regularly. It’s another country, as Shaw might have said, separated by a common language.  

Rayner’s accent is not the accent of the establishment, which means it sounds both wrong but provocatively right. Why shouldn’t ministers speak like large parts of the country north of Kensington? She brings some much-needed authenticity to the slightly anodyne Labour front bench and, to be even more blunt, having seen professional carers working every day over several years, there are many I would happily see in charge of large government departments rather than any of the current incumbents. Carers understand the challenges of life in its most notoriously difficult forms. They understand pain, suffering, and futility. They know what it’s like to be vulnerable and needing support. (They understand life under a system where somebody like me, as a result of being tasked with caring for my sister, earns nothing for the first 55% of the work I do; a system that means every word up to the asterisk in this article – wait for it – is work I’m doing for nothing.)

They often have the compassion that would be a refreshing change in some of the high offices of state.

And yet… 

And yet…

She keeps doing things that leave me slapping my considerably-sized forehead (more about that in a moment) in frustration. She has Joe Biden’s knack of pulling a loss from the jaws of victory. I’m just glad she doesn’t own a bicycle otherwise she’d fall off it in front of the cameras (another Biden trick). 

Speaking of which: how is she navigating stairs? 

Any problems finding the right door out of a room? 

Can she stick to a script without ad-libbing her way into the headlines?

Perhaps not. 

This week she had a chance to take PMQs while the Prime Minister was away, and it should/could have been a chance to push back against some of the attacks directed at her in recent weeks by some inside the Tory party. It was a chance to set the record straight or, at least, counter criticisms that have often felt motivated by class prejudice. Those who make those attacks would deny this is what it is but those of us who have been on the wrong end of class prejudice know that’s how it goes. Chips on our shoulders or others claiming plausible deniability? Let’s agree they meet somewhere in the middle.

What she didn’t need to do was make a quip about “pint-sized” Rishi Sunak’s height.

That’s not her job. 

That’s my job.

Well, okay. That overstates it a bit. I sometimes earn a little extra income by drawing 45 per cent of a cartoon (the first 55 per cent I do for nothing). My dream has always been to draw for Private Eye. I grew up as a fan of Peter Cook but also Willie Rushton. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of heroes like Ronald Searle, Ralph Steadman, and the great B. Kliban. I adore cartoons and particularly political cartoons, which makes it one of my great regrets that Private Eye doesn’t even know that I exist.

Yet still, I plug away or, rather, I did until recently. 

My self-doubt first set in a couple of years ago, when somebody challenged me (*) to explain why caricature is acceptable in the modern day. It took me about two years to realise that the logic was incontrovertible. You should attack people for the things they say and the things they believe. Those are always open to amendment and change. A poor argument can always be countered by a better argument; a prejudice can be exposed for what it is. People are capable of improvement.

Conversely, not many people can do anything about their height, their skin colour, or the size of their nose. They do not choose to be small or round or pink. We don’t generally decide to be bald or have a large forehead. The problem for cartoonists, though, is that the things we might not like about ourselves are the things that make up identifiable. It occasionally lands cartoonists in hot water, such as a few years ago when some US illustrators were condemned for drawing former Trump White House Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Jeff Danziger was, I think, the first. He was accused of body shaming Sanders, who he’d draw in some dour unflattering clothing and, how to phrase this politely, in generous proportions. He apologised. “I am no one to criticise anybody’s physiognomy,” he said. Then Jim Carrey (yes, *that* Jim Carrey) was criticised for the same sin when he tweeted out a picture he’d painted of Sanders. He has since deleted the tweet.

Yet both Danziger and Carrey did what we all do as caricaturists. And in our defence, how are we meant to draw somebody without reflecting their physicality? Are we meant to draw Rishi Sunak as if he were six feet tall? And this isn’t even the end of the problem. It’s only the beginning. What about when somebody – anybody, in fact – has features that reflect their ethnicity? How would somebody draw me without reflecting my Eastern European paleness, my somewhat large nose, high forehead, and heavy eyebrows? How are we meant to draw anybody without resorting to what might be termed “racial stereotypes”? How do you reflect somebody’s skin colour without being accused of making them too light or too dark? (Answer: use a colour picker tool in your favourite painting software and use the same shade as in their best photograph.) 

I don’t have an answer to many of these questions, which is why I have not been drawing much lately. Yet I’m also not sure if it’s a sign of our living in more enlightened times or a stark reminder that we are in danger of becoming humourless, taking life so seriously that we’re removing the fun from life. Do we want the art of political satire to die because we can’t say that our leaders are short or tall, fat or thin?

The very least we can perhaps say is that Rayner was naïve in what she said. The government is on the back foot in so many ways. Why did she lend them ammunition to throw at her? 

But beyond that… I just don’t know, so answers on a postcard. I might, if I ever find my enthusiasm, send you a doodle in the return post of somebody short with big ears. It might or might not resemble the Prime Minister.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life