Satirical depictions of Margaret Thatcher by Gerald Scarfe are be the subject of an exhibition at The Bowes Museum. Steve Pratt talks to the well-known cartoonist about his art and what inspires it

THE way he was brought up posed a particular problem for Gerald Scarfe when it came to drawing Margaret Thatcher. The satirical cartoonist and illustrator came from the generation where mothers drummed it into their children to be polite to women and open the door for them. "As a result, I found drawing women slightly difficult and when it came to Thatcher I had to go against all that," he says.

Scarfe makes no bones about his opinion of the country's first woman prime minister. “I wasn't a fan of hers, but villains are always the best to draw,” he says. "I didn’t agree with her policies. She didn’t appear to have any sympathy for those who couldn’t get up and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. She had no pity for weak members of society, so I could always draw her with an axe, or a knife, or the jaws of a shark.”

Scarfe’s cartoons of the former prime minister are being gathered together for an exhibition – Milk Snatcher, The Thatcher Drawings – opening next month at the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle. More than 100 cartoons will tell the story of the Iron Lady’s days from the shadow cabinet to her leadership of the Conservative Party, her time in Number 10 and ultimately her political decline. They take in the miners’ strike, the Falklands War and the close relations she struck up with the US. In the pen and ink drawings, Thatcher is varyingly depicted as cunning, razor sharp and perversely sexual, in multiple guises including a shark, a chicken and an axe.

The exhibition has been curated by former Turner Prize judge Greville Worthington, but when he suggested the idea to Scarfe, the cartoonist didn’t say yes straight away. “I said, ‘is that a good idea? It’s past, a long time ago’, but he convinced me that Thatcher is a very relevant figure,” he says.

In his 47 years' drawing for the Sunday Times, Scarfe has been called upon to draw many political figures. He doesn’t really like to meet these people – his “victims” he calls them at one point in the conversation – because he might like them or dislike them on a personal level. “A cartoonist’s association with a subject is not a personal one. I didn’t know and didn’t meet a lot of them. It’s purely to do with their policies or misuse of power.

“I have drawn politicians at party conferences in the 1970s and 1980s, going to draw them on the spot because from the point of view of caricatures, it’s very good to see a person in reality. You can judge more personal things, like the way they move. All that feeds into one artistic computer which goes to mould a character when I draw it. I don’t personally loathe them, but there are some I dislike more than others. Thatcher was the first one I was able to get my teeth into because she was an aggressive character.”

You can’t help wondering what she would have said to him if they’d met face-to-face. Scarfe can’t remember meeting her. “I may have been in the same room, but I don’t think I met her,” he says. “I went to a party thing at Downing Street three or four weeks ago for Andrew Marr’s book launch and they were all there. I avoided talking to anyone. They are my subjects, my victims.

“When I first worked for the Daily Mail back in 1966, the editor took me to lunch with Ted Heath and he was rather snooty to me. He put me down as a young man and I felt whenever I drew him this feeling from that lunch would affect the drawings. But my drawings are about policies, not the person.”

Caricatures are not meant to be kind, and are often seen as downright cruel. For Scarfe, a caricature doesn’t just take in physical aspects such as big ears (like those sported by Tony Blair in his drawings) or big nose, but the whole personality and whole feeling of that person. John Major, for instance, was “too mild and grey and bumbling” to be drawn brandishing an axe or a knife.

Some people defeat him on the drawing board. There are those, like Nigel Farrage and John Prescott, who are “walking caricatures”. You might think the same about London Mayor Boris Johnson, but Scarfe reckons, “I can never seem to get Boris. He looks different to the image he projects. He’s difficult. I always draw him as a clown. There’s an image and symbols you can use that the public grow used to in the drawings and that way you can take the public with you.

At the Sunday Times, he presents one drawing a week to the editor “and he accepts or doesn’t”, explaining “I think of myself as a columnist who gives a piece of opinion and hopefully that opinion is not interfered with. It can’t be edited. In a way I have more freedom than a columnist and in this country there’s an increasing amount of freedom for cartoonists. We are very, very lucky.”

Recent events in Paris put political cartoonists in the spotlight and, while it would be nice to say that nothing has changed as a result, he feels that in reality all journalism has been affected, “in the way most newspapers would not reproduce the offensive cartoon or cover”.

Scarfe himself has clashed with groups over his work. He had what he calls “some trouble” with Catholics after he drew the Pope in a cartoon. When he depicted German leader Angela Merkel breastfeeding Greece and Spain in a comment about the European economic crisis, he received complaints from five female MPs who objected to him showing her breastfeeding.

Last year he was accused of being anti-semitic after the Sunday Times published his cartoon showing the Israeli prime minister building a wall with blood red-coloured cement in which were trapped Palestinians. Coincidentally it was published on Holocaust Memorial Day. Newspaper owner Rupert Murdoch took to Twitter to apologise for the “grotesque, offensive cartoon”.

Scarfe says he doesn’t attack people’s religion. “I am not religious myself and when I did draw the Pope, there was a cover-up going on about abusing boys. Generally, I don’t attack people for their beliefs. It’s not an area I am interested in.”

Is there anyone he wouldn’t draw? “No,” he replies. “Some I may be wary of, but I have never come across that impossibility. It’s part of my job and cartoons, to a certain extent, are designed to shock the eye and, in some cases, give offence.”

Until now, the Thatcher cartoons have been spread far and wide. Some are in the National Portrait Gallery in London, others in the House of Commons collection. Some have been exhibited in Germany and the Czech Republic. Now, the new exhibition of original drawings will allow the opportunity, as the Bowes Museum puts it, “to examine the relationship between undoubtedly the finest political cartoonist of our time and one of the best known political figures of the 20th Century”.

  • Milk Snatcher, The Thatcher Drawings: The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, Co Durham, March 14-May 31. For more information visit thebowesmuseum.org.uk