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With victory, Low seemed to run out of targets. "The war stole the fire from his belly," said a friend, but it may have been only increasing age. Colonel Blimp vanished into immortality, and many of Low's best cartoons went into British museums. The old brilliance flashed occasionally, as when Low summed up the nuclear age with an ogre presenting to an innocent baby a new plaything: the atomic bomb. But the light was fitful. Low left Beaverbrook for the Laborite Daily Herald; then he left the Herald for the Manchester Guardian. "One should move along every few years," he said by way of explanation. He wrote several reminiscent books, was honored with knighthood in 1962.
Last April, before entering West London Hospital, the "statesman of cartoonists" produced a vague and cluttered drawing for the Guardian. It proved to be David Low's last cartoon.