As Lady Oxford, Mrs Asquith had caught Orwell’s stern attention in June 1940. She had written to the Daily Telegraph, observing in what Joyce Cary would have called ‘a tumbril remark’ that: ‘Since most London houses are deserted there is little entertaining . . . in any case, most people have to part with their cooks and live in hotels.’ Of this splendid piece of aristocratic callousness Orwell commented in his diary that ‘apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99% of the population exist’. England, whose England?
