Farewell Clare

A great newspaper doesn’t just have excellent Investigative journalism and incisive - and provoking - opinion pieces.  It also contains a penumbra of other features that build a sense of a broad, common community amongst its readers.  Over the years The Guardian (*my* newspaper) has achieved this  by nurturing a rich diversity of talented people, from Araucaria to Nancy Banks-Smith, Clive James to Jill Tweedie.  There was some resonance to the old classified adverts urging us to ‘Share a Flat with a Guardian Reader’.  

Arguably, this sense of a shared community comes through particularly in a newpaper’s cartoons.  In the last fifty years, this has been an area where The Guardian has excelled.  Brian McAllister’s ‘Little Boxes’, Polly Simmonds’ ‘Mrs Weber’s Diary,’ Garry Trudeau in his pomp, and many others are still remembered with enormous pleasure.  

So I was saddened to read that Covid cuts have led to the termination of Harry Venning’s ‘Clare in the Community’ strip, and thought Clare’s final comment particularly apposite (‘Clare in the community: farewell to social workers?’, 25/8/2020).  All the more so when I discovered that Steve Bell’s ‘If…’ cartoon will be ending next year, after nearly forty years of joyful rudeness to those in power.  

I fear my daily paper will be the poorer for these departures.