Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got till you take another look in the store cupboard. A new collection of Martin Rowson’s writings for Tribune opens up a treasure trove of caustically acerbic railings against the wrongs of the world, especially targeting the ‘craven, incompetent, cruel and callous clowns that lead us’.

For 20 years Rowson filled the ‘As I Please …’ slot launched and occupied by George Orwell in two spells between 1943-47, under the editorship of Nye Bevan. The canon of work is a relentless tilt against the truth-suffocating miasma of political cant. Though his tenure came to an end with a change of Tribune’s ownership in 2018, this collection of articles is as fresh, challenging, gloriously funny and anger-inducing as they were when the chosen subjects were first skewered by Rowson’s unforgiving pen.

His is the broadest range of subjects, from high politics to low morals; from international diplomatic spats caused by the author’s eighteenth-century cartoonist hero James Gillray through to the Iraq war, New Labour, 9/11, the power of Rupert Murdoch, Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn, Keir Starmer; with diversions into Syd Barrett, David Bowie and the late Queen Mum. He flays those who would weaponise offence to shut down honest debate, such as those equating criticism of the Israeli government with anti-Semitism.

It’s a freewheeling, sometimes revelatory and irreverent swing at events with the power to wrench the reader into confrontation with uncomfortable realities, or offer copious treasurable gems. Should we all have known that Jim Morrison named the legendary Doors after Aldous Huxley’s iconic The Doors of Perception?

The collection is accompanied by a generous selection of the author’s cartoons – he was Tribune’s main cartoonist for two decades while also appearing in mainstream outlets such as the Guardian, Mirror, Independent, and a myriad of smaller titles with miniscule circulations but politically progressive agendas.

In Rowson’s own words, it amounts to 20 years of ‘screaming my head off’. Now, in an age he once dubbed the ‘hegemony of the accountants’, with its multiplying squilionaires, a growing, permanent underclass and shrinking democracy, the screams are more compellingly urgent than ever.