The painter, the police, and the silence of “liberal” Britain

There is a man who has stood outside Downing Street for the better part of two decades with his paintings. Kaya Mar — a London-based portrait artist and satirist, Turkish-born, stubbornly prolific — turns up most Wednesdays after Prime Minister’s Questions holding aloft his latest canvas, a lurid, grotesque, Goyaesque vision of whoever currently holds the keys to No. 10. MyLondon Reuters He has painted Theresa May as a haunted shop mannequin. He has painted Boris Johnson as a tumbling clown, Adam Johnson-style, surrounded by the gilded tat of a No. 11 refurbishment paid for by party donors. Alamy The Guardian He has painted Keir Starmer and the King. Shutterstock He paints Larry the cat a lot. The works are excessive, ugly, often funny, sometimes crass. They are also, in the unembarrassed Old Regime sense of the word, free.

Mar has been doing this long enough that he is part of the furniture. Photographers know him. Tourists pose with him. The Metropolitan Police, until last Sunday, treated him the way a liberal democracy treats a man carrying an oil painting: as a man carrying an oil painting.

That changed on the afternoon Andy Burnham arrived in Downing Street. As the new Prime Minister’s motorcade turned into Whitehall, Mar was stopped by officers while carrying a satirical portrait of Burnham alongside, naturally, Larry the cat. Reuters Instagram He was, by every account, doing what he has done under May, Johnson, and Starmer without incident. The painting did not change. The street did not change. What changed was the willingness of the state’s uniformed wing to treat a canvas as a contraband object — and the willingness of liberal Britain to look away.

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It is tempting to call this trivial. A man with a painting was spoken to by police. No one was arrested. No brushes were confiscated. But that temptation is itself the first symptom of the disease. Democracies, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue in How Democracies Die, rarely die in coups anymore. They die in the gaps between things that are technically legal and things that are quietly no longer done. They die when the guards at the gate begin, without any order anyone can point to, to ask the painter what he thinks he is doing. Wikipedia Democracy ParadoxDemocracies, in their account, are not strangled in the streets; they are hollowed out, the shell kept intact while the contents are emptied.

The contents, in this case, are satire itself — the right to be unreasonable about power, to be unfair, to be grotesque, to paint the Prime Minister’s face next to a cat and call it truth. This is not a fringe liberty. It is the liberty. Hobbes would have understood the painting; Hogarth would have painted a better one. What neither would have understood is a police officer, on a public street in a democracy, deciding that the timing of a brushstroke constituted a problem worth an intervention.

Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, insisted that totalitarianism does not arrive as a foreign occupation. It emerges from within — from the atomisation of citizens, the slow normalisation of the unfree, the willingness of functionaries to act pre-emptively on behalf of power without being told. Internet Archive The genius of the system, she argued, is that nobody has to give the order. The functionary simply intuits what is wanted. An officer stops a painter. The painter is not arrested. The news cycle moves on. And a small, invisible line is redrawn: this street, on this day, belongs to the new man, and the painter’s place is elsewhere.

Timothy Snyder put it more bluntly, in On Tyranny: “We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, communism, or their predecessors.” timothysnyder.org His warning — that the slide is visible only to those willing to look at small signs — is the one liberal Britain has refused to heed. We have spent a decade reassuring ourselves that we are not Hungary, not Turkey, not the places in Levitsky and Lucan Way’s catalogue of competitive authoritarianism — regimes that hold elections, keep the courts open, and yet steadily criminalise the friction of dissent. Democracy Paradox We have a BBC. We have Speaker’s Corner. We have, until last Sunday, a man with a cat painting outside Downing Street.

What is being revealed, slowly, is that British liberalism was never quite the thing it advertised. It was not, as its defenders liked to claim, a neutral floor of rights upon which all opinions could stand. It was a curated space, governed by taste and class, in which dissent was permitted precisely because it was expected to be decorative — a Turner Prize shortlist, a Jonathan Pie monologue, a Kaya Mar painting the photographers would chuckle at and the Prime Minister would never have to see. The liberalism was real, but it was conditional on the satirist knowing his place: visible, harmless, comprehensible as a curiosity.

That condition has now been withdrawn. The new Prime Minister — a man whose entire brand is competent, northern, decent, managerial — arrives, and the same liberal state that shrugged at Johnson-era paintings instantly reorients itself to protect his arrival from the indignity of being mocked on his own pavement. This is how the slide actually feels, in the country it happens to: not a jackboot but a slight tightening, a polite officer, a painter moved along. Masha Gessen, writing about the texture of life under autocracy, has called it the verb tense of the future — the moment you notice that something you used to do without thinking now requires permission you do not have.

The sin of Kaya Mar, on Sunday, was not the painting. It was the timing. He refused to treat a Prime Minister’s arrival as a solemn occasion rather than a public event in a public street. He insisted that the arrival of power is, and must remain, a moment at which power can be insulted. For that insistence — for the offence of treating Burnham as he treated May and Johnson — the state put a hand on his arm.

Liberal democracy, Arendt warned, has a peculiar propensity: it can sustain its own dismantling, because its institutions are designed to tolerate the intolerant and its courts are designed to defer to the executive. The very openness becomes the corridor through which the closure walks. Internet Archive Britain is not Hungary. But Britain is now a country in which a man with a painting of a cat and a Prime Minister is moved off a public street on the day the new Prime Minister arrives, and the liberal commentariat, for the most part, has decided this is not the story.

It is the story. It will be the story for some time. The artists always know first.

By Edward Torsney – 2026