SIR – There is a bitter irony behind the news that the BBC is finally to permit a statue of George Orwell outside its headquarters.
As you report, under Mark Thompson, the director-general, the BBC refused to let the project go ahead because he feared it might make the BBC look “too Left-wing”. Yet, to the current hard Left, Orwell is a Right-wing traitor because, in 1949, he supplied British intelligence with a list of those he believed to be “fellow travellers” or “crypto-Communists” working undercover at the BBC.
But then Orwell knew, from experience in Spain and elsewhere, the difference between decent democratic socialists on the one hand and Lenin’s “useful idiots” and other supporters of Marxist totalitarianism.
John Torode
London W1. Telegraph.
London W1. Telegraph.
