The Guardian deletes ‘anti-Semitic’ cartoon of outgoing BBC chairman Richard Sharp

The Guardian UK has removed a cartoon it published of outgoing BBC chairman Richard Sharp after conceding that it failed to meet its editorial standards.

Outgoing BBC chairman Richard Sharp. Picture: AFP/ PRU

The British version of The Guardian has deleted a controversial cartoon of BBC chairman Richard Sharp after the illustration was labelled “anti-Semitic”.

The illustration by Martin Rowson was published in the national newspaper on the weekend but it was quickly removed from its website following an uproar over the depiction of Sharp, who is Jewish. The cartoon depicted Sharp leaving the BBC with a box marked Goldman Sachs (the investment bank where he was once employed), a squid and a puppet of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in his hands.

The Guardian published a note on its website that read: “The cartoon that was posted here today did not meet our editorial standards and we have decided to remove it from our website.”

Rowson also apologised and said through “carelessness and thoughtlessness I screwed up pretty badly”.

The cartoon depicted Sharp with extremely dark and unflattering features, and was published following his resignation on Friday from the BBC’s top job after he was found to have broken the rules by failing to disclose his close ties with Boris Johnson, who was prime minister at the time of Sharp’s appointment.

A controversial cartoon by Martin Rowson showing BBC chairman Richard Sharp. It was published in the UK's Guardian on April 29, 2023 and later deleted. Picture: Guardian

Mr Sharp helped provide Mr Johnson with an £800,000 ($1.52m) loan guarantee.

In the cartoon, alongside Mr Sharp was a pile of faeces and sitting on top of it was a nude Mr Johnson, yelling at him: “Cheer up matey. I put you down for a peerage in my resignation honours list.”

The Jewish “puppet master” who manipulates events has been a long-running anti-Semitic trope. British politician Sajid Javid condemned the illustration on Twitter and said he was “disappointed to see these tropes in today’s Guardian”.

“Today’s @guardian cartoon wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Nazi newspaper. Guardian really should have known better,” he wrote on social media.

Broadcaster Piers Morgan also posted on his Twitter of his disgust at the cartoon.

“The Guardian’s on a real roll,” he tweeted.

“Slave-owner founder shame + publishing anti-Semitic letters and now cartoons.

“The self-righteous cancel culture chiefs really should now cancel themselves.”

In March, The Guardian’s owner published an apology over its founders having had links to transatlantic slavery and said it would pursue a decade-long program of restorative justice.

Author Dave Rich said the cartoon “falls squarely into an anti-Semitic tradition of depicting Jews with outsized, grotesque features, often in conjunction with money and power”.

“The problem is that a squid or octopus is also a common anti-Semitic motif, used to depict a supposed Jewish conspiracy with its tentacles wrapped around whatever parts of society the Jews supposedly control,” he said.

“Is it possible that a cartoonist as experienced as @MartinRowson is unaware of these common anti-Semitic traditions (plus whoever else at the Guardian saw it)?”

The fallout from the cartoon came just several days after Labour MP Diane Abbott wrote a letter responding to a column in The Observer, the sister paper to The Guardian, suggesting that Jewish people do not experience racism, but instead suffer prejudice that is similar to “redheads”.

The party’s leader, Keir Starmer, condemned her remarks and said Labour had “zero tolerance” for anti-Semitism. Ms Abbott has been suspended.