A wayward political journey

In spite of all of the evidence to the contrary, I still tend to think of individuals as staying fixed in a political sense, probably because I am myself and most of the the people I know personally are too. But of course such steadfastness/stupidity (delete according to choice) does not apply to many people, and some time ago I came across a striking example in the League of Nations Union papers at the London School of Economics of just how far an individual can travel politically. The Union was the type of rather well-meaning (but, with the benefit of hindsight, hapless) inter-war organisation that is likely to have attracted some acerbic comment from George Orwell: who should be listed as a rather generous donor in the 1922 Annual Report but Oswald Mosley - 'put me down for £50', he probably didn't say. That rather eccentric individual's political journey has been well researched, but this does show just how far people can shift.

There are two ways of looking at these political journeys: either people are so ideologically confused that they themselves don't know and understand what they profess to believe; or they are brave and original thinkers who nimbly react to changing political conditions and refuse to be contained by any orthodoxies. A tough one to decide: it could be the latter, except that the political journey always seems to be one way - rather a sign of simply having given up I fear.

Such, Such Are The Joys ...

More treasures from the India Office collections, this time in the form of two brief references to some character called E. A. Blair. In some ways, Eric Arthur Blair is a fiction that will forever be overshadowed by the nom de plume he created for himself, and so being out of reach he is perhaps of more interest. Not that there was much in the way of substance to what I found in the India Office Lists for 1927 and 1928: one, a terse announcement that Blair had joined the service as a district superintendent in Burma on 29 November 1922, the other an equally short note advising of his 'retirement' on 12 March 1928. Not that there is any great mystery about this period of the man's life - it produced two classic essays, and doubtless the references I looked at have been used by his many biographers. But the thrill of seeing it there in black and white, and knowing something of what lay behind his decision (momentous as it turned out) to 'retire'! This is George Orwell I'm on about - not some Phil Space hack writing to order for the tabloids.