I AM glad that the BBC are to put up a statue to George Orwell. Four years ago, the Corporation turned down the idea – because they judged that the public would think their statue to Orwell would confirm the suspicion that the BBC is full of left wing bias. Gosh – people might think the Beeb is run by lefties! Surely not!

Melvyn Bragg, Jim Naughtie, The Today Programme entire; ditto Woman’s Hour and every radio “comedy” show going. It was Naughtie, remember, who once asked on air a Labour MP, “Are we going to win the General Election?” But the BBC is right to reverse its earlier judgement and agree to the statue: because Orwell was a fine writer, an accomplished satirist and a powerful authority on the use of English. The statue will not be paid for out of the tax which misleadingly goes under the name of the licence fee. It is funded out of money given by the late Labour MP and Orwell fan Ben Whitaker.

Orwell may have started out as a high-minded, romantic socialist and his Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) expose the extreme poverty that existed in the industrial slums of that decade. But he didn’t end up a socialist. For, when socialism was practised moderately, it was represented by the traditional Labour party; when socialism was practised extremely, it was exemplified by the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1989. In the moderate version, we get higher taxes and more state intervention, while in the extreme form there was total state control, tight press censorship, secret police, the exile of dissidents to the gulag and Stalin’s genocide of the Russian people. This totalitarianism is sharply criticised and memorably satirised in Orwell’s best-known books Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1948).

The forthcoming statue marks the patching up of a quarrel between the BBC and Orwell, who worked in the talks department. So strongly did he come to despise the BBC that he resigned with a flourish in 1943. Later he revealed that he had modelled his nightmare Room 101 on his office in the Corporation. He also said that there are similarities between the totalitarianism which operated in the USSR and the organisational practices of the BBC. In 1948, Orwell gave a friend who worked for a Foreign Office unit, the Information Research Department, a list of 37 writers he considered unsuitable IRD authors because of their communist leanings. Not many lefties would have done that.

He was a great coiner of phrases and the creator of powerful images. For instance, “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Example: The Guardian newspaper’s fondness for rap music with its horrible lyrics about violence to women, alongside its enthusiastic feminism. Orwell wrote hundreds of political essays and columns, but oddly he didn’t much like politics, of any hue. He wrote: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

The most instructive piece of writing which, thankfully, came into my hands when I was in my teens and trying to write for the newspapers was Orwell’s short essay Politics and the English Language.