In September 2021, Bob Moran — then busy balancing his unlikely dual roles of Chief Political Cartoonist at the Daily Telegraph and Unofficial Cartoonist Laurette of the Great Awakening™ — got into trouble.This trouble ultimately resulted in his losing his job (the Telegraph one, that is), forcing him to think of new ways to support his young family.
Many celebrated his fall, including some of his Telegraph colleagues. These had been leaking their discontent for some time. A year earlier, the first in a series of reports had appeared in Private Eye:
"Hacks at the Daily Telegraph are increasingly horrified by their main political cartoonist, "Bob", aka Bob Moran - not so much for his cartoons as for his noisy presence on Twitter, where he has become a hero to Covid sceptics and anti-vaxxers..."
Meanwhile, for the average normie, Bob's sacking (if they noticed it at all) likely seemed well-deserved, having resulted from a reasonably rough Twitter skirmish with a model citizen of technocratic progressivism, Dr Rachel Clarke.
An active doctor in palliative care and COVID wards, Dr Clarke was also a best-selling author of three books, and an Oxford graduate (of PPE) with a background in foreign affairs journalism.
She was more recently a frequent talking head on UK news — sometimes appearing in her scrubs, as if having stepped directly from intensive care - where she would implore Boris Johnson to act more "decisively" on issues such as lockdowns and vaccination, citing the purported "human cost" of any hint of hesitation deploying the New Normal in its full glory.
From her spotless Twitter account ("she/her") to her Ted Talks on compassion and love, Dr Clarke always expressed herself in the fluent, firm, self-assured tones of the English upper middle classes. She was as perfect a picture of liberal "goodness" as you could hope to encounter.
"Bob", on the other hand. was just the anonymous presence lurking behind his seemingly mean-spirited sketches, which ridiculed almost every pandemic response, gestured towards vast global conspiracies, belittled the virus that had gripped the world in mortal terror, and scorned the institutions commonly looked to for protection and guidance.
One of the two could not be wrong. But where was "goodness" really found? The palliative care doctor along with the institutions and global policies she extolled? Or the fleet street cartoonist, and the no less global network of activists and cynics whose suspicions and misgivings he had vividly articulated since the lockdowns began?
Needless to say, read the whole thing