Bite the air in Britain and you can taste the prejudices that haunt us. I’m sorry I became part of it | Martin Rowson

After drawing a cartoon including antisemitic tropes, I am trying to respond in the best way I can: to apologise, to learn and to be vigilant

I have been a political cartoonist my whole adult life, and I believe what I do is important. Satirical cartoons weave together humour and weird kinds of sympathetic magic to damage, and thereby try to curb the excesses of, powerful people through caricature and mockery, by means of metaphor and symbols: things signifying things other than themselves; allegories and allusions; tropes, if you like. They also require a lot of deniable ambiguity, because they undermine power by laughing at it, and power has a huge armoury of weapons with which to answer back.

Nonetheless, instead of the rather pompous definition of satire as puncturing pomposity", I've always preferred the punchline of the great joke where a son comes home from work complaining to his mother about his new boss. She replies, with the wisdom of mothers: If he's so special, how come he shits and he's going to die?"

Martin Rowson is a cartoonist and author

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