An era of tragedy, cruelty and slapstick: what it has been like cartooning these 14 Tory years | Martin Rowson

Each government has been a challenge, each leader sillier and more ruinous than the last. But even cartoonists crave a bit of boring earnestness sometimes

For the past five weeks people have repeatedly said to me, “You must be really busy!” I’ve had to explain that elections aren’t like that; in fact, from the point of view of cartoonists, they’re boring. The only real fun comes when the wheels fall off the party machines and their careful choreography collapses into farce. But in this election even the Tories’ serial weapons-grade balls-ups are becoming a bore, serving merely to remind me of the universal truth that reality will always, always be weirder than anything satire could think up in a million years.

That said, in the empty hours of this interminable death watch while we’ve waited for the Tory tumbril finally to trundle to the guillotine, I’ve been reflecting on the past 14 years, and how the worst government of my lifetime has been succeeded five times by one that was even worse.