PETER HITCHENS: Are the Left’s thought police about to cancel George Orwell? Socialists have long loathed the 1984 author because he ruthlessly exposed their absurdity. Now a book claims he was vile to his wife, homophobic and a sadist

Is George Orwell about to be cancelled? This skinny, scruffy Old Etonian has been a major burden on the left for over 80 years.

As a revolutionary, anti-imperialist, who was actually wounded in the fight against dictator Franco during the Spanish Civil War, he is overqualified for socialist sainthood.

After serving as a colonial police officer in Burma, Orwell renounced and condemned his actions in that post. He lived as a vagabond, worked for starvation wages in Paris and personally experienced the misery and poverty of the Great Depression. He cannot be dismissed as a public school elitist.

Yet he has also been one of the most effective and ruthless critics of the left’s shortcomings. In two powerful classics, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, he indelibly exposed and satirized the left’s persistent tendency toward intolerance, repression and the creation of police states.

He knew what he was talking about. The communists tried to kill him in Spain because he was the wrong kind of socialist, and they almost succeeded. He also mocked his comrades for their ridiculous fads and mocked them: “We have reached a stage where the very word ‘socialism’ conjures up an image of vegetarians with withering beards, of Bolshevik commissars (half-gangster, half-gramophone), of serious ladies in sandals, shocked polysyllable-chewing Marxists, escaped Quakers, contraceptive fanatics and Labor backbenchers.”

George Orwell is one of the most effective and ruthless critics of the left’s shortcomings, exposed in two powerful classics Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Eileen O’Shaughnessy, the first wife of writer George Orwell, had to endure his grim, austere life, living in great discomfort in more or less squalid homes.

Imagine how his pen would have torn apart Extinction Rebellion, veganism, ‘taking the knee’ and Sir Keir Starmer. It is a mystery that the BBC erected a statue of Orwell outside their headquarters. I can only conclude that no one there actually read what he wrote.

But I did, and I must confess that for many years of my life it was more important than anything else I read, or learned, or experienced. Like any educated person, I had read the two great anti-totalitarian works in my early teens, but I was seventeen when I first opened his Collected Essays, Journalism And Letters. I still have my tattered paperbacks from the 1960s, priced in shillings.

This treasure trove of genius, written with the simplicity of utter honesty, would one day help me find my way out of the Trotskyist dogma in which I had imprisoned myself. Together with his friend Arthur Koestler, he has offered me and many others a way to change my mind without giving up my mind.

That’s why the left is so suspicious of him. He was undoubtedly on the side of justice and freedom. He had played a true and courageous role in the Spanish Civil War, which was the first and last crusade of the idealist left, and which ninety years later still has the power to continue.

Ultimately, he remained a British patriot who deeply loved this country, its people, its culture, its freedom from state power and its literature. Many on the left hate this aspect of him, but know it cannot be denied. The power of his books and thoughts is a nuisance to them. But what can they do? He’s just too good to be torn down.

Well, now I have a feeling they’re preparing for an attack that might pull the statue off its pedestal after all. For Orwell was, you see, a man, and a man who existed for much of his time. He had prejudices against Jews, against Scots (I have the personal word for this from one of his former secretaries) and against homosexuals.

He denounced other leftists in the British government in the early years of the Cold War. And his attitude towards women was about as bad as it could get. He is accused of trying to rape an early girlfriend, Jacintha Buddicom.

Dystopian vision: Orwell’s famous creation Big Brother in the film Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)

As Kathryn Hughes described the miserable episode in The Guardian in 2007: ‘Earlier the young couple had kissed, but now, during a walk in late summer, he had wanted more. Just five feet away, Jacintha had screamed, shouted and kicked before running home with a torn skirt and a bruised hip.

Such an action by any young man today would undoubtedly have resulted in serious trouble, if not imprisonment. And of course we are in these times now, so it is very damaging and who can or wants to defend it?

But is it enough to cancel Nineteen Eighty-Four or Animal Farm, or the collected works, or Spain? Leo Tolstoy was an absolute beast to his wife. This also applied to Charles Dickens. But they are purely literary superstars. Orwell’s position is partly political. If he can be discredited among the modern left, he could falter and fall. I have a feeling it could be enough.

For a new and menacing front has just emerged in Orwell’s investigations. After an avalanche of largely friendly biographies of Orwell (one academic has written two) we now have a biography of his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, whom he married in a village church in Hertfordshire in 1936.

Poor Eileen had to endure Orwell’s grim life, living in great discomfort in more or less filthy dwellings and having to clean up the filthy toilet, a chore that Orwell hated. She followed him into mortal danger in Spain (and then, through quick inspiration, helped him get him out) and died, tragically young at the age of 39, during a hysterectomy in 1945.

Orwell had often treated her in a nonchalant manner, which was perhaps not unusual among Englishmen of his age and class.

But in 2023 this is now extremely important.

My heart sank when I read that the author of this work, Anna Funder, believes: “Patriarchy is a fiction in which all the main characters are male and the world is viewed from their point of view.”

She published her book Wifedom: Mrs. Titled Orwell’s Invisible Life, in case readers and buyers doubt its cold theme. The clever cover only shows part of Eileen’s face.

The rest has slipped out of the frame. Eileen is the Cultural Left’s perfect weapon against Orwell because she was a modern woman before her time and he treated her miserably. She had a good degree at Oxford (something her husband never achieved) and Mrs Funder speculates that she may have made a major contribution to her husband’s successful books, without any recognition. Who can say now?

However, it is easy to suspect that Mrs. Funder has it in for Orwell. She recently told a literary festival that he was “hugely homophobic, but strongly attracted to men and, I think, not particularly sexually interested in women.” Talk about the worst of both worlds, that of 1943 and that of 2023.

Her invective is somewhat tempered by meager praise for his writing skills: “So he’s a very complicated man. He is sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent and also brilliant. And I think he really wants to be decent.” Want to be? But was he? Maybe not.

Does it matter? Yes, whether we like it or not. Patriotic conservatives could use Orwell against the old left because he was one of them who saw through them.

But now that he’s an alleged rapist, misogynist, homophobe, etc., the modern left can and will respond that he is in fact not theirs at all, and if conservatives like him it just shows that they are all rapists and misogynists too . I think the BBC should make quiet plans to move that statue.

It doesn’t belong there anyway.