HE is gentle, shuns the limelight – but is also an artist of strong convictions.
Not only on canvas. Once, he broke convention by reducing the Queen’s head on a postage stamp to the now familiar silhouette.
On Saturday in the Guardian the well-known artist David Gentleman (pictured) displayed his other self, a man fiercely angry with the government over the way it deceived the public over the Iraq war.
In a letter he compared the Iraq war to the invasion of Poland by Hitler in 1939 – the start of World War II.
In a passionate passage he described Blair as “irrational…sanctimonious”, a man full of “self-dramatisations” who “invented terrors to justify his contempt for the freedom I learned back at school”, a man who had helped to bring about a “needless, disastrous and bloody involvement in the colonial US war in Iraq.”
His thoughts crossed my mind as I spotted placards in the protest march against the war on Saturday – they all carried his unmistakable style of fine draftsmanship and dissent.
For Gentleman, a long time dissenter, his designs have filled recent Trafalgar Square anti-war demos with hundreds of blood-spattered placards bearing the injunction “Troops Home”.
Catching up with him at his Victorian home in Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town, this week he seemed as if he had somewhat cooled since letting rip on the Guardian letters page.
He trusted that I wouldn’t paint him as a “crank”.
How did Gentleman, who is now 75 years-old, explain the tone of his letter in the Guardian?
He paused. Clearly a man who weighs his words carefully when talking to a journalist, Gentleman replied: “It’s simply how I felt after reading Robin Cook in the Guardian…” Cook had written that many pensioners wouldn’t be voting Labour out of apathy.
Gentleman in his letter described how as a boy he had lived from 1939 to 1945 through “a real and dangerous war.”
Asked by the Stop the War Coalition to design a new set of placards for Saturday’s march, he quickly worked on a new design against the war, the newly introduced terror laws and the threat to Iran and Syria.
Naturally, Gentleman was only too eager to take part in Saturday’s demonstration. He told me he chatted to many marchers, all from a striking array of backgrounds, yet all united in carrying his placards.
“I told one woman that I had designed them, and her response was ‘Oh, that’s very neat’ which I think is the first time anything I’ve done has been described as neat”.

There’s no turning back the clock for Sir Trevor

Frank Dobson MP and Sir Trevor MacDonald at the Jewish Museum

I pottered along to the Camden Town’s Jewish Museum in Albert Street on Tuesday to a party celebrating the launch of a new exhibition to mark 100 years of immigration laws.
Titled ‘Closing The Door? Immigrants to Britain 1905 to 2005’ and focussing on the centenary of the 1905 Aliens Act, which was designed to make it harder for Jewish people from Europe to escape persecution and settle in Britain, the museum has laid on a fantastic display of 100 years of multi-cultural artefacts to celebrate the diversity of London life.
And they invited the ITN newscaster Sir Trevor MacDonald along to open it.
I caught up with him and Holborn and St Pancras MP Frank Dobson as they strolled through the displays and read some of the personal stories of people who had come to make a new life in Britain – and said how much it reminded him of his own experience. Born in Trinidad in 1939, he considered the link between his country of birth and Britain strong: “the British had been coming to Trinidad since 1797, and the two countries are intrinsically bound together.”
So I asked him what he felt about the hysterical debate between the Blair government and Michael Howard’s band wagon-jumping Conservative party.
But the voice of News At Ten was slightly muted.
He said: “Because of my contractual obligations with ITN, I’ll leave the politics to Frank – but if you scratch me a little bit when I have had a glass of wine, I’ll tell you exactly what I think about the people who say immigration is a problem nowadays.”
He continued to explain eloquently why immigration was crucial to Britain’s success - and why the debate about quotas and who should be let into Britain was ‘frankly silly.’
He added: “It is amazing how the same arguments occur, as they did back in 1905.
“You cannot turn time back – Britain is a multi-ethnic society and it is a better place for it”.

Bad news for Margot?

IF the Holborn and St Pancras branch of the Conservative Party was expecting to have their spirits raised last night (Wednesday), they were let down by former MP Matthew Parris.
The witty Times columnist, brought in to gee up the troops at the last fundraiser before the general election, had bad news for prospective Holborn candidate Margot James and her chums at the Rebecca Hossack Gallery in Windmill Street, Fitzrovia.
He said: “I don’t think we are going to win.
“We are so far behind that our chances are very small, and, if I’m honest, I don’t think we’re quite ready to form a government.
“Nor are the electorate quite ready to elect us.”
Later, he told me he thought Margot, the Tories’ first out lesbian candidate, deserved the chance to fight a winnable Tory seat next time around.
Sadly Margot was in hospital with her mother, who had suffered a fall, and wasn’t around to hear his kind words.
But he joked: “This is the youngest branch of the Tory party I have seen in 30 years.”
The youngest man in the room, Bangladeshi-raised Abdul Salaam, 30, had no complaints about Parris’s candour.
He said: “He just explained the way all of us feel”.