For someone who has blighted the corridors of power for more than three decades, cartoonist Steve Bell’s lair is modest. That drawings that have surely infuriated several world leaders were spewed out from a chaotic garden shed in Brighton’s Stanford Avenue is at once cheering and faintly disappointing.

It was at its overflowing, paint-splattered desk Maggie Thatcher developed her “mad eye” (a legacy passed on to Tony Blair), John Major was immortalised as the Y-fronts- wearing “Superuselessman” and David Cameron was first slipped into a condom – the better to illustrate his “pink and rubbery” face.

Bell too is more homely than his caustic output might suggest, with a beard that threatens to eclipse his face and a frequent thunderclap laugh. Although the 60-year-old father-of-four occasionally crops up as a penguin and “Monsieur L’Artiste” in the strips he produces daily for The Guardian, he really ought to be a bear – cuddly but with a bit of a temper when provoked.

He and his wife Heather are “inveterate shouters at the radio”, he says, beginning with Radio 4’s Today programme at 6am and continuing in much the same fashion until the end of the day. Anger, after all, is the fuel that feeds the satirist’s fire.

“You can’t simulate anger and if you do, it doesn’t half show,” he says. “Luckily, there always seem to be things that enrage me.”

For evidence of this, one only needs flick through Bell’s latest book, where the political landscape of the past four years is refracted through the lens of his daily Guardian strips. The typically hilarious, endlessly puerile If…Bursts Out sees George Bush (slightly) re-imagined as a chimpanzee with a gun, the Iraq Inquiry conducted by a collection of talking testicles, toads “love-bombing” Nick Clegg and, of course, the infamous “Camerondom”.

The Prime Minister took the cartoonist quite a while to “get” (he started out as a jellyfish) and he was delighted when he felt he’d finally nailed him. His target was rather less thrilled. Bell bumped into him at a motorway services during the general election campaign and recalls the Conservative leader saying: “You’re not going to carry on with that condom thing are you? There’s only so far you can push a condom.” He lets out a belly-shaking guffaw: “That’s the worst thing he could have said to me! Once you know something’s got to someone…”

Not so long ago, such an encounter would have left Bell quaking. “When I started going to the conferences in 1980, I would have run a mile rather than speak to the people I’d drawn [quite wisely in the case of John Prescott, who reportedly threatened to thump him] but you learn that politicians are generally fairly thick-skinned. Also, they exist by being recognised, so by focusing on their appearances, you’re doing them a backhanded compliment in some ways.”

He recently found himself in the awkward position of curating an exhibition of his work with former Conservative MP-turned-Cartoon Museum board member Kenneth Baker, who Bell once scrawled as a flabby-chinned grotesque. “He’s very good at fundraising and he’s actually very keen on cartoons,” he says, somewhat grudgingly.

Professionally, the cartoonist welcomed the new Coalition Government for providing him with “a whole new cast” to take his pen to; personally, he feels it represents a return to the “bad old days” of the 1980s, when Maggie was both his bête noire and his muse. “Sometimes I dig out my strips from the ’80s and I think, I could have run that this week – we’re in the same situation we were in then. Things might have a different gloss on them, but they’re not much different.”

He has yet to come across anyone who inspires the same level of hatred in him as Thatcher did. Major was “ridiculous but not loathsome”, Blair is “getting loathsome but he’s not in power any more”, he rather liked Brown and as for Cameron, well, “he’s just…a rubber man. He’s too pink and bouncy to really hate”. The Iron Lady still makes appearances in his work to this day. She is gleefully portrayed in the new book in a state of frothy-mouthed, strait-jacketed agitation in “an institution somewhere in the Home Counties”. He doesn’t seem able to let her go. Is it possible he might miss her in a strange way? He shakes his head adamantly. “I did Maggie for 11 years and it felt much longer. It was a joy to draw her demise.”

Bell admits he is a born anti-authoritarian and his job is as much a matter of necessity as anything else. He tried to be a teacher for one unhappy year in the 1970s, at a Birmingham comprehensive.

“I was hopeless,” he says. “I had no confidence in my own authority and I wish I’d twigged earlier instead of forcing myself to go through 12 months of hell.”

The fine art graduate hastily returned to the world of “colouring in”, freelancing for children’s comics including Jackpot and Whoopee, before getting his big break producing the Maggie’s Farm strip for Time Out, which – as well as being condemned in the House Of Lords as “an almost obscene series of caricatures” – brought him to the attention of The Guardian. His relationship with the newspaper has been going strong ever since. “I get astonishing leeway from The Guardian. They just let me get on with it.” With rare exceptions – he and editor Alan Rusbridger had words about the Camerondom – Bell draws what he likes (or rather, doesn’t like) in his work for the paper, with little editorial direction. “If we have any disagreements it’s usually about taste and decency rather than any sort of political censorship,” he adds.

Although he freely admits his work can be tasteless, accusations that he trivialises serious situations rile Bell. Certainly, it’s hard to suggest cartoons such as that of January 15, 2009, which depicted a rubble-strewn Iraqi street, a dishevelled banner reading “Only five more bombing days to go till Bushless” are just about raising a smile.

“Just because you’re using humour doesn’t make it trivial. Sometimes the more serious something is, the more we need to be able to laugh at it. And it’s always good to bring succour to people in difficult circumstances. Living under Thatcher for all those years was very hard if you felt as I did and were at all Left. It’s nice to think people might enjoy what you do – not everybody, admittedly – and you might be saying things they want to say. Whether any of it has an effect or changes people’s minds about anything… who knows? I wouldn’t lay any great claim to anything.”

One thing Bell can be sure of is that, much as they might wish it weren’t so, his cartoons often come to define a politician’s image – just look at John Major, who was haunted by the motif of grey underpants for most of his career. “Hopefully I made a little contribution to depicting him as a useless prat,” Bell chuckles.

Outside working hours, Bell tends to leave pen and ink well alone. Although he likes doing the odd “watercolour daub” and sometimes makes birthday cards for his family (“I’m a right jobsworth about it, too”) caricature is an offensive weapon and he is very careful who he uses it on. Drawing, he says, is never an activity to be undertaken lightly. “You have a have a reason to do it.”

* If… Bursts Out is published by Random House and costs £16.99