There isn’t much room for doubt about the real source of anti-Orwell resentment. In the view of many on the official Left, he committed the ultimate sin of ‘giving ammunition to the enemy’. Not only did he do this in the 30s, when the cause of anti-fascism supposedly necessitated a closing of ranks, but he repeated the offence in the opening years of the Cold War and thus — ‘objectively’, as people used to say — became an ally of the forces of conservatism.
