General Election 2024 seen through an artist’s eyes

The first, in 2001, was portrait painter Jonathan Yeo, probably best known for his portrait of King Charles III, which he unveiled earlier this year.

The whole thing was a “wonderfully bonkers experience”, he told me from his studio in west London.

“Tony Blair was refusing to sit for portraits, or at least his advisors didn’t want him to do it.”

So the Committee came up with an idea: why not have an election artist and make it portrait focused?

“An election is a bit like when two sides go to war,” Yeo says, “and there’s a long tradition of war artists documenting wars and to have an election artist doing the same job, but then with the secondary job of getting a portrait of the three main party leaders.”

Getting enough time with Blair to sit for a portrait was difficult. The other party leaders, William Hague and Charles Kennedy, were game but, surrounded by advisors, Blair was kept at distance.

“I was usually kettled along with the journalists on the battle buses” Yeo says “or the photographers and the cartoonists.”

Eventually, a plan was hatched. Yeo would wait in Blair’s office at lunchtime and, when he returned, he’d have no choice but to sit for an initial portrait sketch.

“Blair comes in, and he’s super charming, and I manage to do a few sketches and take a few photos, and after about two minutes, Alistair Campbell walks in and says ‘Right, you’ve had your time, now… [go away]’.”

The result was Proportional Representation; a punny triptych of portraits of the main party leaders, sized according to their share of the public vote.

“I placed Blair in the middle, Hague on the right and Kennedy on the left. At that time, Blair was quite centrist and in many ways, Lib Dem policies were to the left of Labour polices.”

In 2005, he told a select committee the scheme should continue.

“I think there’s a great potential to make this a tradition. I think there’s a lot more story telling that can be done around it.”

“It’s the moment where politicians engage with the public, and it’s that dialogue that an artist can interpret in an interesting way.”

That engagement is perhaps most vividly represented by the piece produced for the 2019 election by Nicky Hirst.