Professor Sir David Cannadine explores political fame and image by looking at how an object or prop can come to define a political leader. In this episode - Harold Macmillan as Supermac.

In the mid 1950s, both Harold Macmillan and Superman were on upward trajectories, albeit very different ones. Yet suddenly, and unexpectedly, towards the end of the decade, their careers intersected and overlapped. The person who brought them together was Victor Weisz, the cartoonist. He was a talented artist with left-leaning sympathies, whose cartoons appeared in British newspapers under the by-line of ‘Vicky’.

Vicky’s heyday coincided with Harold Macmillan’s rise and fall as a Prime Minister. And it was while at the Evening Standard that Vicky produced his most famous caricature of Macmillan, introducing ‘Supermac’ to the world. It was an image Macmillan quickly appropriated to enhance his image, but once his popularity was on the wane, the Supermac image was finally turned against him in the way that Vicky had originally intended.

David visits the cartoon archive at the University of Kent, and he speaks to the cartoonist Steve Bell about how Vicky’s caricatures have influenced his own take on a more recent Prime Minister, John Major.

Series Producer: Melissa FitzGerald
Series Researcher: Martin Spychal
Readings by Will Huggins

A Zinc Audio production for BBC Radio 4 Show less