Matt on finding the humour in Brexit
‘It’s like a soap opera. I’m absolutely gripped every day’
Every day on the huge, open-plan office floor of The Daily Telegraph,a man in a jumper and dark blue jeans can be seen walking slowly along, staring into the middle distance, occasionally stopping at a desk to exchange a word with a colleague before setting off again, his boyish features thoughtful once more. Sometimes he carries in his hand a few scraps of paper and, if you are especially lucky, he will thrust these in your direction.
“Which one do you like?” he says gently, with that genuine interest in your view that marks out the truly charming. But like the judgment of Paris, this ritual is both blessing and curse. Because the man in the blue jeans is Matt, this newspaper’s superstar cartoonist, whose talent and universal popularity has elevated him to the ranks of those, like pop stars and Brazilian footballers, who go by only one name. And the cartoons on the scraps of paper are all, always, ludicrously funny. Choosing is a nightmare.
This is the first thing to know about Matt Pritchett, 54. For every cartoon that appears in the Telegraph there are five more that don’t make it. And plenty more jokes that were jotted down, but never drawn up.
“I have this habit of doing six,” he says, sitting at his desk in a corner of the office overlooking Buckingham Palace Road. Several floors below, countless commuters are rushing for their trains in
Victoria station, unaware that above their heads a master is at work.
Yet while his 31 years at the Telegraph have brought Matt reverence from his peers and countless awards, being relentlessly funny is never easy. “I still find it very hard, the day I’ve done it, to judge a joke,” he says. “Doing six means that sometimes it’s the one I just did to make up the numbers that’s the best. The brakes have come off.”
In British politics, meanwhile, it’s the wheels that have come off. Brexit, a subject on which a new collection of Matt’s cartoons is to be published, has provided a bottomless well of source material. “Chaos is always good for comedy,” he laughs, with that amiable but merciless glee that so characterises his beloved creations.
He freely admits, however, that it is like no other subject he has ever covered. “Usually, in the past, you’d read something, or hear someone, and think: ‘Oh yes, that’s probably what will happen.’ But with this, it’s extraordinary – simply nobody knows. That makes it very different. We could have three prime ministers this year.” He looks wistful at the prospect of such political carnage, smiling faintly at the artistic possibilities.
For all its boons, though, Brexit seems to have made everyone angry. To the outsider, that hardly appears to be prime comic material. “That
‘You’ve always got to be silly. I am always proudest of the silliest jokes’
can make it tricky,” he admits. “But usually I find, in the Brexit debate, you’re teasing politicians. And nobody minds that. What’s really good is that the readers are very aware of every twist, even though it’s been going on for years. So it’s like a soap opera with a cliff edge every day. I’m absolutely gripped.”
Flicking through his Brexit cartoons, it’s remarkable how Matt can be so pointed without declaring an interest himself. “I’m afraid I can see both sides,” he says diplomatically. “I don’t know if it’s necessary to being a cartoonist, but I am the worst flip-flopper in the world. I’m like the proverbial armchair that bears the impression of the last person who sat on it.”
Indeed, such a temperament is imperative, he finds, to keep his work funny. “You mustn’t be too furious, which fortunately I find easy.”
It’s true. In the newsroom maelstrom, Matt’s unlined face is proof of his preternaturally easy-going demeanour. But, as politicians and his other victims know to their peril, calmness should not be mistaken for blandness. “There has to be an edge,” he says. “It can’t all get too luvvy luvvy and twee.”
Sure, there are times when the complexity of Brexit has tested Matt’s genius to explain and send up in a simple drawing what others spend months debating. A proposal for Ireland to have an “imaginary hard border” he illustrated with two mime artists, leaning up against thin air between Ulster and the Republic. Such technicalities, he says, are “important and a little bit ridiculous at the same time”. Rich fodder, in other words.
But on other occasions, the sheer depth of our political mess requires blunter humour. One cartoon in the collection features a fan on the pavement outside No 10. A sign in front reads “For Sale: Needs Cleaning.”
“I think it was just a particularly terrible day for the PM,” Matt recalls. “She’d lost a vote by 230 votes. I must say I find one way of thinking of a joke is simply to wonder what it must be like inside No 10.”
Not that it’s always easy keeping up with which failed vote is which. As he looked back through his archive to assemble the Brexit book, Matt found that not every cartoon was dated. “I’d done something about an MP calling for the PM to go, and wondered ‘Was that yesterday?’ Because it might have been any time in the last two years.”
Knowing where to start was another difficulty. “I could have gone all the way back to Maastricht.” He groans at the prospect. In fact, the collection begins with David Cameron’s failed renegotiation with the EU and moves swiftly on to the campaign. Unlike Brexit, however, a firm deadline means the collection is actually out, even if the country is not. “Publication date means publication date,” he laughs.
These days he divides his life between London and Suffolk where, despite his absurdly youthful looks, he has grown-up children, three girls and a boy, including Edith, who has herself become a cartoonist for the “slow news” site, Tortoise. “She rings me and says ‘What are you doing yours on?’” He cackles mischievously. “I try to put her off the scent. I’m very cagey.”
But there is real as well as faux rivalry. As anyone who has worked with cartoonists knows, for all the laughs, theirs is a serious, competitive business. Despite the constant output, they are like fisherman, always seeking to land “the big one”. “There is that hunt for the elusive joke – the funniest joke in the world,” says Matt.
To find it, he has two guiding principles: “You’ve always got to remember to be silly. I am always proudest of the silliest jokes. And the other thing is never to try to do jokes to show the world how clever you are. I’m not trying to make a profound statement. I’m just trying to go for a cheap laugh.”
As usual, he’s being modest. Because what he delivers is always a rich guffaw, the product of those hours pacing the floor, thinking of the idea, then of drawing and redrawing his characters’ faces and poses until, somehow, no matter how absurd their situation, they become perfectly believable.
“It either comes first time or else I keep going over and over again until I just think, ‘Yes, I really believe that woman is coming through the door and saying that’. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I know it when I’ve drawn it.”
So while a degree of artistic insecurity persists (“Most days I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do it”), he has no desire to do anything else.
“I still leap out of bed listening to the Today programme, thinking: ‘Oh good, there’s another ridiculous Brexit twist.’ While the outgoing PM has been the butt of countless of his jokes, he admits to sharing a weakness with her. “Most cartoonists seem to carry on a bit like Theresa May, until they’re dragged out.”
Not that, in his case, anyone will be complaining about his determination to carry on. Unlike Westminster, we can rest easy. As can he. “Calm political competence is my real nightmare,” he says. “But I don’t think I’m in any danger there.”