[7] McMurtry viewed his role as making "dreary news copy of the daily paper brighter, by putting in a laugh", and claimed that his work was apolitical despite its frequent engagement with issues of race, gender, and sexuality.
In 2001, the British Medical Association received an apology from the Daily Mail for its publication of a McMurtry cartoon which depicted a black, immigrant "witch doctor" jumping on the bed of a shocked, white NHS patient.
[10] In November 2015, Mac was accused of "spectacular racism"[11] for his cartoon featuring caricatures of African tribes people selling shrunken heads, which referred to the news that singer Tom Jones would undergo tests to discover whether he had black ancestry.
Later the same month, following the Paris attacks by Jihadists, Mac produced a cartoon depicting refugees with exaggerated noses crossing the EU's borders with rats at their feet.
Some journalists suggested the cartoon evoked antisemitic imagery used by Nazi propagandists, including in their notorious film The Eternal Jew (1940).