Heath on Heath

‘I don’t know why I became a cartoonist,’ says Michael Heath. ‘I had no education during the war, so when I was twelve and war ended, I couldn’t read or write like children now. I suppose I sort of expressed myself by drawing.’ He is sitting in the conference room at The Spectator, surrounded by shelves of leather bound back volumes, almost sixty years worth of which are filled with his drawings. I’m shocked to learn he was born in 1935 — he doesn’t look anywhere near a man in his seventies. He still treks miles to work every day on foot. 

Cartoons today, he tells me, aren’t at all what they were. There are fewer of them, of course, but they’ve also lost much of their bite: ‘Back then if you drew a cartoon attacking a politician, they’d be horrified,’ he remembers. ‘These days they love being caricatured — they buy the original and hang it in their loo.