Orwell spinning at 45rpm

A.N. Wilson puts words in Eric Blair's long-dead mouth and reporting on a horrific case delivers more than the Two Minutes Hate

Previously: A note on The Daily Telegraph and the paranoid style in British newspapers…

Content warning: This edition covers a case involving the murder of children. Either skip this edition or stop reading after the video if you’d like to avoid that content.

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I sometimes listen to Times Radio. That’s not the confession of a fetish but of a kind of professional necessity. During one such period this week, I heard Stephen ‘Stig’ Abel — obsequiousness made flesh — introduce the vampiric A. N. Wilson as “our favourite book reviewer”. Speak for yourself, Stigbert.

Wilson has been a fixture of the British media for decades; he is the author of a book on Darwin described by Dr Adam Rutherford as “deranged: literally the worst book I have ever read about Darwin and evolution”. Rutherford continued:

The only valid criticism I can find herein of Darwin is that he might have been flatulent, which can be attributed to a serious disease that he picked up on his travels on the Beagle.And so on. I can't for the life of me work out how a serious writer could draw these conclusions about someone who has been studied for more than a century, on a subject that millions of people have spent millions of hours and millions of £££ testing. I can only conclude that AN Wilson is not a serious man.

Wilson’s Hitler biography was similarly poorly received by people who actually know about the topic. It was so littered with factual errors and inaccuracies that the historian Sir Richard J. Evans wrote that it was “breathtaking in [its] banality” and “evidence of [Wilson’s] repellent arrogance… [thinking because] he's a celebrated novelist, he [could] write a book about Hitler that people should read, even though [he] put very little work into writing it and even less thought”.

In 2006, Wilson’s Betjeman biography was sabotaged by the poet’s biographer, Bevis Hillier, who sent him a fake letter containing an acrostic that read: “AN Wilson is a shit.” Wilson’s latest contribution to The Times provides evidence of his ongoing commitment to being shit and a shit.

Headlined ‘Animal Farm is still horribly relevant today’, the column includes what appears to be 2023’s most deranged sentence…

I am perfectly prepared to believe that Orwell behaved badly towards [his wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy], and if he had been married to one of my daughters, I hope I’d have horse-whipped him on the steps of my club.

… before immediately upping the ante with its conclusion:

No creature, animal or human, emerges with much dignity from Animal Farm and it reminds us that there is no political system in the history of the world that is innocent. I remember conversations about Animal Farm with Orwell’s great friend Malcolm Muggeridge who had personally witnessed Stalin’s show trials in the Soviet Union. “Yes,” he would say when I clumsily likened these to the pigs’ behaviour in Animal Farm. “But, you know, I have come to see that Eleanor Roosevelt” — ie the embodiment of western smug liberalism — “did more damage to the world than Hitler and Stalin combined.” I thought of those words when I finished my umpteenth reread of Orwell’s masterpiece, and realised he would certainly have agreed.

That’s Wilson comparing civil rights activist and sometime antisemite Eleanor Roosevelt with… the architect of the Holocaust and the man who masterminded the gulags (following on from Lenin’s lead). The column shows just how willing The Times is to let its ‘star’ columnists write any old shite; were another paper or one of the people it considers beyond the pale to make a similar point, it would scream in horror.

Earlier in the column, Wilson rehashes the old claim that Animal Farm is “a terrible indictment of left-wing idealism” despite the fact that Orwell explained in Why I Write (1946) that:

Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it. 

In the preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, Orwell explained:

[I]n my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country. . . . And so for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.

During the Spanish Civil War, Orwell fought with the POUM — an independent Marxist party — which Stalin had ordered ‘liquidated’. Members of the POUM were captured, tortured, and killed by Soviet-aligned forces. Orwell escaped across the border but the murder of their comrades played a significant role in his antipathy towards the Bolshevik model and his anti-Soviet position.

I’m picking over the minutiae here because Wilson hasn’t and won’t. There is a vast amount of information by and on Orwell that gives a clear picture of his intentions and thoughts on a huge range of issues. But for Wilson, the man born Eric Arthur Blair is just useful as a vehicle for his views and reheated piss from the also long-dead Malcolm Muggeridge, a man famously bested by John Cleese and Michael Palin in a debate about Life of Brian:

While Wilson’s gibberish is likely to slip into the forgotten sludge of history, Orwell left us with many images that still resonate. The aftermath of the verdicts in the case of Lucy Letby — who was found guilty of the murders of seven newborn babies and the attempted murder of a further six (the jury found her not guilty on two other counts and could not reach a verdict on a further six counts of murder) — brings to mind the Two Minutes Hate from 1984:

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

Footage of Letby’s original arrest has been supplied to broadcasters and newspapers, all of them offering it up with what feels like a kind of moist-eyed glee. Inevitably, The Sun — ignoring all the warnings about giving killers prominence and nicknames — splashes on pictures of Letby at a hen do “hours before murdering her first tragic victim” and howls that she is “the angel of death”.

All of the papers put Letby’s face on their front pages and offer up thousands of words of speculation on her motives. The victims and their families are pushed into the background, turned into numbers for the stat that every media organisation seems to be obsessed with “the most prolific killer of babies in modern history”. Prolific. What a grotesque word to use; one better suited to describing a musician’s output or striker’s scoring record.

It is over 30 years since the conviction of Beverley Allitt, a nurse who was convicted of murdering four babies, the attempted murder of three others, and causing grievous bodily harm to a further six. Reading the coverage of that case shows how little the British press has really changed in the intervening years. Here’s how a column in the Evening Standard from May 1993 described Allitt:

I know of no more spine-chilling photograph than that of Beverley Allitt, who smilingly dandles a baby (whom she subsequently assaulted three times, causing permanent brain damage, and whose twin she had already killed) on her knee. The Allitt of this photograph could not look more completely a picture of the comforting nurse, plump and maternal. 

Now consider the crocodile tear-stained exploitation of Allison Pearson’s column in The Daily Telegraph today:

But she looks so normal. One reason the guilt of Lucy Letby was so hard for parents and colleagues (eventually, even jurors, perhaps) to countenance is that she appeared so innocent. Butter wouldn’t melt. “A joyful and peaceful aura that just made everyone around her comfortable,” says a childhood friend. With her big, candid blue eyes, neat blonde ponytail and broad smile, Letby is exactly the same kind of sweet, capable, young nurse any exhausted new mother would be delighted to hand the baby to. Even the alliterative name (those two chiming L’s) has a kind of sing-song nursery quality. 

That’s not the writing of a serious person; it’s cheap emotional manipulation applied to a truly horrific story. For columnists like Pearson, dead babies are props to get the easy rage and forced emotion that they crave. Why shouldn’t a beautiful blonde be a killer? I suspect Pearson is most uncomfortable when the blonde and white commit horrific crimes because it’s all a little too close to home.

The cheap tactics continue:

Her crimes [are] a grotesque perversion of our deepest maternal instinct, she is our generation’s Myra Hindley. 

Pearson goes on to imagine and speculate about why Letby committed the crimes for which she’ll now be jailed. She glories in it:

Masquerading as an angel, the witch preyed on the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. 

… Evil is strong, but good is stronger. It may not feel like it today, but there are more angels than demons. 

As usual, Pearson finds exploitation easy. These are greetings card sentiments thrown around carelessly in writing about a case that requires so much care.

The Daily Mail leader column is just as cheap. It howls:

Why did they not stop this monster sooner?

… how a vivacious, church-going young girl, who enjoyed salsa lessons with friends and partying in Ibiza, could attack and poison vulnerable young innocents, sometimes while their worried parents slept just yards away, will doubtless occupy criminologists for years to come. 

The tabloid culture that has its boot on Britain’s neck prefers the idea of ‘monsters’ and ‘unimaginable evil’ because the complexity of how people become killers is too much to handle. The right questions in media coverage are: Was this a cover-up? Why was Letby able to do what she did?

Thousands of words wondering why being blonde and ‘nice’ and ‘church-going’ does nothing to stop being a killer say a great deal about what reporters, columnists, and editors assume a murderer looks like.

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