Boris Johnson has called for resignations at the Guardian newspaper following criticism of a cartoon it published featuring BBC chair Richard Sharp.
The newspaper on Saturday took down the controversial image after critics said it featured a series of anitsemitic tropes.
The former Tory prime minister, who himself was also depicted in the cartoon naked atop a pile of excrement with two large sacks of money, told the Mail on Sunday:
“Frankly whoever commissioned and printed this has made a far worse mistake than Richards Sharp. They should take his lead.”
Apologising, cartoonist Martin Rowson said through “carelessness and thoughtlessness I screwed up pretty badly”. The Guardian said the cartoon did not meet its editorial standards.
Mr Sharp stepped down as BBC chair this week after a report criticised him for not disclosing his role in getting Mr Johnson an £800,000 loan guarantee.
The cartoon shows him leaving office with a box marked “Goldman Sachs”, his former employer – as well as a CV, and toys or puppets of a squid and Rishi Sunak.
The idea of Jewish people as “puppet masters” has a long history as an antisemitic trope.
Some critics said the squid could also be read as an octopus spreading its tentacles, an idea which has also featured in antisemitic propaganda.
Author Dave Rich wrote on Twitter that the cartoon “falls squarely into an antisemitic tradition of depicting Jews with outsized, grotesque features, often in conjunction with money and power”.
Mr Rowson said the cartoon had gone “horribly wrong” and that while the representations were inadvertent he took full responsibility.
“Satirists, even though largely licensed to speak the unspeakable in liberal democracies, are no more immune to f****** things up than anyone else, which is what I did here,” he said.
The cartoonist said Mr Shap’s “Jewishness never crossed my mind as I drew him” but that “there are sensitivities it is our obligation to respect in order to achieve our satirical purposes”.
“The cute squid and the little Rishi were no more than that, a cartoon squid and a short Prime Minister, it never occurring to me that some might see them as puppets of Sharp, this being another notorious antisemitic trope,” he said.”
