Steve Bell’s Inner London Wildlife. Keir Starmer’s dragon will never kill it
One of the enduring features of Steve Bell’s long running Guardian cartoon strip was the Inner London Wildlife branch of the Labour Party. The strip ended earlier this year but not before a final appearance where the Chair of a Zoom meeting was castigating members for failing to wear Union Jack waistcoats.
Bell still does large op-ed cartoons though and one this week had an echo of the Inner London Wildlife branch in the context of the decision by Labour’s NEC to proscribe some groups that it for one reason or another did not like.
In British mythology St George slays the dragon. Here Keir Starmer is sitting on the dragon (Boris Johnson)while pointing his lance at three moles who have emerged from their burrows. One at least is raising two fingers.
The mole of course is a symbol of revolution, burrowing underground and surfacing in the most unexpected of places. The analogy was made by Marx but Robin Goodfellow (Puck) in a Midsummer Nights Dream has a similar function.
Political leaders often appreciate well made criticisms of themselves perhaps because they mark them out as people worth criticising. I’m not sure Sir Keir is quite in that place.
Steve Bell the still hirsute cartoonist drew the original Beard Liberation Front logo and the BLF has made occasional appearances in his cartoons. Its supporters in the Inner London Wildlife branch of the Labour Party have of course been on difficult ground since the leadership of the Party changed from the person who has won the Parliamentary Beard of the Year Award most often to someone who appears to relish nothing more than a visit to the barber.
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