By George?

Peter Hitchens is justly proud of having won the Orwell Prize.

Orwell’s patriotism, his social conservatism and his anti-Communism are vitally important in reminding the British Left that those are indispensable, and indeed definitive, aspects of our own tradition. All three, though perhaps especially the last, make him a particularly significant figure when set alongside Christopher Hill and E P Thompson in rescuing demotic culture from what Thompson called “the enormous condescension of posterity”.

But Orwell was not above condescension. Not least. his depiction of Wigan is still resented in the town to this day. Furthermore, his famous remark about the goose-step, was just plain wrong, like many of his others. And everyone should read Scott Lucas’s The Betrayal of Dissent, London: Pluto Press, 2004, ISBN 0-7453-2197-6.

Orwell is good. He is important. But he is still overrated.