Cartoonist Martin Rowson on 32,000 years of visual satire

And now he is launching a new spoken word tour in Shoreham examining the 32,000-year history of visual satire - which dates back to the earliest cave paintings.

"The cave paintings captured in Werner Herzog's film Cave Of Forgotten Dreams have more in common with my work than the work of Leonardo Da Vinci," says Rowson.

"It's something about the caricature - the exaggeration of the images to get to the truth of them."

Rowson sees himself as part of an unbroken 300-year lineage of visual satire, which creates the characters we all love to hate through exaggeration.

"We know about statesmen like Pitt and Charles James Fox through the caricatures of the time," says Rowson, who was inspired to begin his craft after reading an illustrated history book at the age of ten.

He has since reworked classics by great 18th century satirists including Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Laurence Sterne's epic Tristram Shandy.

Modern politics has created memorable subjects for satire - from Steve Bell's John Major in his underpants, to the many simian versions of George W Bush.

“I remember in 1997 I asked Steve about how he felt about the Labour landslide," says Rowson. "He said he had lost his reason for living. He used to love drawing Major with his underpants over his trousers - especially doing the holes in the Airtex pants. Everyone thought it was so boring when John Major became Prime Minister as he was so grey and bland - but that was the fantastic thing about him.

"I loved drawing George Bush and his eyebrows like two chinchillas running over his forehead."

But there are always new targets for the satirist's pen and ink.

"I get so much joy out of drawing Michael Gove," says Rowson. "There's something about George Osborne too - he's clearly quite uncomfortable in his own skin. He probably hates the way I draw him, but tough!"

That’s not to say Rowson didn't give him fair warning of what might be to come.

“He opened an exhibition of mine ten years ago as shadow chancellor," recalls Rowson.

“I told him there were no pictures of him that evening, as I hadn't known what he looked like.

“But if he got to the top of the greasy pole I would draw him every day – and he would cry himself to sleep every night.

“His response was: ‘If I had known it was going to be like this I wouldn’t have come!’.”

Rowson is frustrated television hasn’t seen the comic potential for the current Coalition government.

“Why haven't the commissioning editors created a political comedy where Vince Cable and Osborne share a flat - it's comedy gold!" he says.

“David Cameron is the first Prime Minister in my lifetime not regularly impersonated on television. Television seems to think satire consists of stand-up comedians making long drawn-out observations - but satire is all over the newspapers and internet.”

He doesn’t believe the general decline in newspaper sales is hitting satirical comics – with the internet providing a much wider audience.

“Since my work has been on The Guardian website it has been seen by more people than had hitherto read the newspaper over the last 150 years put together,” he says.

“Cartoons were only first published in British newspapers in 1900. I’m like a parasite – if our host dies then I will hook onto another one.

“I now get death threats from countries I have never heard of!”

He sees his job is to give offence – and takes his detractors lightly.

“A death threat that arrives by email doesn't count,” he says. “It has to come hand-delivered to your home address in green ink with one of your children’s ears. The internet gives people an instant opportunity to complain.

“I personally don’t attack people because of what they are, but what they think. I don’t attack because of gender or ethnicity.

“There is an ever-increasing group of people who recognise that one of the best forms of attack is to take offence. I have offended people across the political spectrum I even got rolled in the s*** by atheists for my depiction of Richard Dawkins!”