‘It’s like Where’s Wally in broken Britain’: Ben Jennings on his Tory-era take on A Rake’s Progress

A millennial navigates the gig economy, fights in pubs and gets kettled on a demo in Snowflake’s Progress, the Guardian’s political cartoonist’s Hogarthian epitaph for the last 14 years of Conservative rule

Guardian cartoonist Ben Jennings and I stand forlornly before Sir John Soane’s Museum in London as we are told that is it closed. We had planned to see William Hogarth’s tragicomic painting cycle A Rake’s Progress, the model for Jennings’ Snowflake’s Progress – his personal picaresque survey of broken Britain.

Like a couple of ne’er-do-well Georgian fops, we have mucked up – until another journalist generously phones the director, Will Gompertz, who comes down to size us up. The former BBC arts supremo apparently thinks what the hell and gives us a VIP tour of Soane’s atmospheric house.

Continue reading...