Nineteen Eighty-Four: Dominic Sandbrook on Big Brother, Surveillance, and Fear (The Book Club)

Why is 1984 as relevant today as when it was published? Who is Big Brother, and why is he so powerful? What was George Orwell's intention when creating the world of 1984, and what does it tell us about politics today? Alastair Campbell is joined by Dominic Sandbrook to delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of 1984, the world it was born of, and the novel itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Alastair Campbell?

  Hi there, it's Alistair here. Welcome to The Rest Is Politics. And today we've got a very special guest from our stablemate podcast, The Rest Is History, Dominic Sandbrook. Welcome.

• 0:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Thank you, Alistair. It's nice to be on a proper professional podcast for once.

• 0:18Alastair Campbell?

  Ah, not always you say that. Dominic, you are here to discuss your new show and it's called The Book Club. Tell us about it.

• 0:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  So it's a show that I do with my producer on The Rest Is History, who's called Tabitha Syret, and we always chat about books and what we're reading, our favourite novels. And we did a mini-series together on The Rest Is History for Rest Is History Club members, where we talked about some of our favourite books. The listeners liked it amazingly, so we decided to launch it as a standalone show. We've done four or five episodes, and we recently did an episode that might appeal to you, Alistair, because it's on a very political book. It's actually last week's episode, and it was George Orwell's 1984, which I think you read when you were at school, is that right?

• 1:01Alastair Campbell?

  I think I read it in 1974. So I read 1984 and 1974. I think that's why I remember it. And my God, yeah, it's so relevant. It is so relevant. When I look at what's happening in the States right now, whether you, you know, you look at ICE and you think, oh, this is all a bit Big Brother-ish.

• 1:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:20Alastair Campbell?

  You look at the way that Trump communicates and you're tempted to say this is all a bit Orwellian. I mean Orwell and Orwellian and 1984 have entered the language, even for people who have never read that book.

• 1:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, we were talking about this on the show, actually. It's such an interesting thing, because there aren't many books that embed themselves in the imagination so successfully. And a lot of the concepts that Orwell comes up with, so the idea of Britain as airstrip one, the idea of double think. So in other words, having two ideas in your head at once, and one of them you know is a lie, but you force yourself to believe it anyway. The thing about Big Brother, the thing about Room 101. I think what's so interesting to me is that, I don't know whether you'd agree with this, is that it's obviously, you read it, it's massively a book of its time. So shaped in the Second World War and the Cold War. And what Orwell's writing about is the totalitarianism of Stalin in particular. But as you say, you look at the world now. So his idea that you're being observed through

• 2:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  your telescreen. And it's checking every detail of your facial reactions and whatnot. And people are watching you the whole time. And the party, the sort of propaganda ministry is pumping out this stuff, you know, war is peace, freedom is slavery, that people must at some level know is not true, but they're going along with it anyway. It feel, it does feel very relevant, doesn't it? And I think that the Trumpian stuff, you know, Trump's use of social media, and the way in which ever since his first term, the Healy's administration would tell people things that everybody in the room knew were untrue. And yet the MAGA movement kind of forced themselves to believe it. It is pretty chilling, actually.

• 3:03Alastair Campbell?

  What was the, the phrase about, you know, not believing your own eyes? Because that's kind of where I felt we were in Minnesota.

• 3:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 3:12Alastair Campbell?

  I actually felt it. We were talking on the podcast this week about Trump's reaction to the death of Robert Mueller. So there's Robert Mueller. Robert Mueller said, you know, he did the Russia investigation, the Russia hoax, as, as Trump called it. He dies. And Trump, I mean, social media didn't exist when all was right. It didn't exist in 1984. But his first instinct and his reaction is to put out a post saying, I'm glad he's dead. It means nobody else can be hurt. Now, that's horrible, but it's very kind of in on message, on brand for Trump. But then to see every Republican who's out being interviewed on

• 3:55Alastair Campbell?

  the day, trying to say why it's not a terrible thing to say, when deep down, they know that it is. And likewise, you know, Charlie Kirk gets assassinated and most right minded people come out and say, that's a horrible thing, whatever his views, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But no, for the Trump MAGA law, you had to come out and say, he deserves half flags at half mast around the country. We, we should all attack the left because they killed him.

• 4:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 4:24Alastair Campbell?

  I think Berlusconi is a big part of this. The development of this culture that we now have, he was maybe the starter. He understood if you get media, you get the lead, hand on the levers of media, you get sport, as he did through football, only one of the biggest clubs in the world. And then he does the political stuff and he becomes prime minister. But then the guy took it to the next level, I think it was Putin. Nothing is true, anything is possible. That's a classic Orwellian.

• 4:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it is.

• 4:49Alastair Campbell?

  Nothing is true, anything is possible. How Putin remade modern Russia, which is another book you should do for the book club, by the way. And then we now have Trump, who he's nothing is true, anything is possible.

• 5:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  I agree completely. So I think at the core of this is the idea of truth and is there such a thing as identifiable, verifiable truth. And in 1984, you may remember that one of the ways in which they break Winston Smith, when they've, Winston is the main character, he's tried to rebel and they've taken him into room 101. And one of the things they basically get him to do, they want him not just to say that two plus two equals five, but they want him at some level to believe it. So there's a line that goes from Stalin's show trials in the 30s. He broke like the old Bolsheviks, the people who'd been at his side in the 1910s and 1920s. They came out and they confessed that they had been plotting against him and working with the allied powers, even when they hadn't. And they, you know, it's always been a question, did they actually believe it themselves? And

• 5:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  I agree with you that you now look at people, particularly in America, and you think to yourself, do they believe, you know, Trump's spokesman or whatever, or J D Vance, or Rubio, or whoever, do they actually believe deep down in what they're saying? Or when the cameras are off, do they walk away? And do they say, well, actually, you know, I'm just being cynical. I'm just doing this for personal advancements. And I don't really believe it. It's hard to know though, isn't it? Because the first people they're convinced with their lies are themselves, don't you think? That people often can fool themselves a little bit?

• 6:15Alastair Campbell?

  I don't believe that Rubio believes what he says now. If he does, then the character that we've seen over the decades he's been building his career, he was a fraud. One of them's a fraud.

• 6:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, well.

• 6:27Alastair Campbell?

  Um. And I think it's the one now because basically Trump is, he's remade the Republican Party, he's become all powerful within it. And the only way to advance and to stay advanced is to be, you know, as far up Trump's backside as it's possible to be. When we interviewed on leading, we interviewed the Polish Foreign Minister Sikorski, and I was asking him about Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, who I'd always sort of felt was a quite impressive figure in his own right. And so I said to Sikorski, look, you've met this guy dozens and dozens of times. Is he impressive? Is he a serious diplomat? And he said, well, he

• 7:07Alastair Campbell?

  was, but he's not now, because his entire existence now depends on essentially echoing whatever Putin says, does or wants. And I think that's where the people around Trump are now. It's why I've got to say, I mean, you know, when I was in, working in government, you know, we got accused of spin and of lying and of manipulation, all that stuff. Now I can defend what we did. But the point, the, the reason why I think I, I am able to defend that is because in Tony Blair, we had a, a leader who didn't only not fear being challenged internally, he expected it. Whereas I think we now have in Trump and

• 7:51Alastair Campbell?

  Putin and probably Erdogan and probably Modi, and quite a lot of the big leaders around the world, I think we have people who are deliberately surrounded by echo chambers.

• 8:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 8:01Alastair Campbell?

  And I think that's dangerous.

• 8:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Don't you think that what we have now, though, is a, is a media landscape, a sort of political landscape, in which is capa, you're capable of creating a gigantic echo chamber now, in which actually people come to, and that's, it's not just the echo chamber, but it's also that people simply don't, it's impossible for people to identify where the truth lies. So when Trump says relentlessly, um, I actually was cheated in that previous election in 2020, and even You know, you and I know that he wasn't and that he lost fair and square, but he says it so relentlessly. And the the media ecosystem that he's created, so not just Truth Social, but X and his loyal TV channels and whatnot. They pump that message out and you just, I just wonder, somebody in 10 years' time, you know, somebody who's a child now who wants to look into it.

• 8:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  What will they believe and what will AI tell them? What will they know is the truth? You know, that's, that's quite a chilling thing, I think.

• 8:54Alastair Campbell?

  The other thing that I'm mildly obsessed with is Trump's, so he uses these percentages all the time. We've cut your prescriptions by 300%. What does that mean? It's impossible to cut it by more than 100%. You cut it by 100%, it means it's now free. Cut it by 300%, it means you're paying double what you were paying. But you hear people then repeating.

• 9:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is rest is politics bingo, I know, but this is like Boris Johnson and his new hospitals, isn't it? Just make up a stat and, and, and people will believe it and people will repeat it, it's in their minds.

• 9:29Alastair Campbell?

  Some people believe it and what, what the trouble with what's happening now with the echo chamber, with the algorithmization of life. Is we can all end up only consuming the stuff that reinforces our beliefs all the time. I think that's what's good about these long form podcasts is that, you know, we do at least try to get to base all our very, very strong and strongly held opinions on something that is factually accurate. But you know the thing about Orwell, I mean, I obviously I do most of my talking now on the podcast, but I still go to the BBC quite a lot. And there's that statue, there's an amazing statue of Orwell outside the BBC. And it's, you know, and he's leaning forward, it's larger than life and he's leaning forward.

• 10:12Alastair Campbell?

  And I've got to say, I wonder whether the BBC people are conscious enough of what it says on that statue. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. And that's absolutely right, and that should be the role of media.

• 10:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Completely.

• 10:28Alastair Campbell?

  It should be to challenge and to scrutinise. And right now, I feel that because of the magification of global politics, I feel that at the moment, they're not really doing that to, I would argue, to the right. I don't think they did it during Brexit. I don't think they did actually tell people what they didn't want to hear. They told them what they did want to hear.

• 10:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 10:48Alastair Campbell?

  One of the reasons why we're in the mess that we're in.

• 10:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, without further ado, here for you all is a clip from our episode of The Book Club that Tabby and I did about George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and we hope you enjoy it.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  So this is a world of total surveillance, and when Winston reaches his flat, he reflects that the telescreen in his flat will capture every sound and gesture. So he lives with the assumption that everything will be overheard, every moment scrutinised. He even says at one point that there's only, there's one kind of safe moment in his day, and that's when he's in his bed with his eyes closed in the darkness.

• 11:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  And as the story unfolds, he starts to kind of gradually rebel in very, very small ways against the suffocating grip of the party and Big Brother. So for instance, you know, it's really, really small. He buys an antique journal and starts keeping a diary. Because the reason that's a rebellion is because that's kind of his own. It's his own thoughts and considerations. It doesn't belong to the party. He has seditious thoughts of his own, and he buys an amber paperweight from this kind of antiquarian shop. And the reason that's seditious is it's because it's from a former age. So.

• 12:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's from the past.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  It's from the past, exactly. And the past doesn't exist anymore. And perhaps most memorably, he starts an illicit affair with a character called Julia, who's his colleague. And together, they become involved with another colleague called O'Brien, who they think is part of a resistance group called the Brotherhood.

• 12:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  This doesn't end well, does it?

• 12:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, it's a big spoiler alert, it doesn't end well. So, as lots of readers will know, they're arrested and Winston ends up in the dreaded Ministry of Love.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  The most nauseating name.

• 12:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. And specifically in its most feared room, which is room 101. And we'll come back to what happens in room 101. So. Nineteen eighty-four, it's a dystopian political warning. It is a doomed love story. It's a horror story. It's a work of science fiction. It is a reflection on the importance of history, a warning about the corruption of language. But more than any of those things, I mean, that all, you know, those are, those are aspects of it, but up bottom, it is a really gripping and terrifying story. I mean, it is a brilliant read. My son read it when he was about eleven or twelve and he absolutely, I mean, he didn't care about any of those things. He just loved it as a gripping story.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Totally. I mean, it's, it's a page turner throughout and Orwell is a master of suspense. He builds that as, as we go on and it's, it's a phenomenon. And I mean, I think probably unmatched in the twentieth century, maybe apart from by Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings. And surprisingly, you know, that, that's a comparison that we'll, we'll touch on later. You wouldn't think to put them together, but, but you can. And its legacy is just, it's gigantic. The words and concepts from nineteen eighty-four, so many of them are, are really familiar today. You know, Big Brother, Room One O One, both of which, interestingly, have spawned reality TV shows. So that's the idea of being, of being watched.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  So it's George Orwell, the progenitor of Love Island. And then you have Thought Crime, Double Think, The Two Minutes Hate, airstrip One, et cetera, all of this. And the word Orwellian has actually come to donate something in itself. It's associated with totalitarianism, with kind of the curtailment of freedom. Like, people even used it, I remember, during the, the Covid lockdowns.

• 14:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course, yeah.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, massively. And the, above all the surveillance culture that I think most people today are so familiar with. So there's loads, loads to talk about here. There's Orwell, he's a very interesting figure, the times that he lived in, what this book's all about, why it's endured and has seeped into culture in the way that it has. And also, I always think it's interesting, like, to explore whether or not it is a period piece born of that particular moment, or whether or not it's actually a prophecy with less For us today.

• 14:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  So I love George Orwell, the man as much as the books. He's a lodestar for me for lots of, as he is for many writers. I once made a TV programme about Britain in the early Cold War that touched on 1984. And actually, when I was, I mean, you were good enough to read one of my more inflammatory columns.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Or the title of one of my more inflammatory columns. I mean, I probably, in my, in my days as a columnist for Britain's best loved mid-market newspaper. I must have quoted from George Orwell about 6,000 times. He's one of those writers that basically, whenever you, when you've run out of a, when you've run out of ideas and you're groping desperately for a conclusion, Orwell is the writer that you, that you retort. But interestingly, actually, Tabby, I have a sense that Orwell appeals much more to men than, than to women. So I've never really heard you wax lyrical about George Orwell. And I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say that the person producing this podcast, Aliyah, is not an Orwell fan.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  No, she described this as a boy book. And I think she is not entirely wrong there at all. I mean, I think, and I remember thinking this the first time around as well, and I was struck by it this time, it's, it's clearly, you know, ingenious and highly original. But I think there's a big difference between admiring a book and liking it. And I, I don't really like 1984. And I think there is something in, in the idea of it being much more of a boy book than a girl book. I actually, I did a bit of digging and they did a, a YouGov poll in 2014, which showed that men were much more likely to read 1984 than women. I think there's various, various reasons for that. I think in part because it's a book that deals much more in kind of structures and kind of

• 16:35Speaker 02

  systems, power systems and structures than relationships. It's, it doesn't, it's, it's not very interior. It's, it's emotionally really, really stark and cold. There's very little kind of relational fulfillment. And the whole thing is centred on one man's perspective, you know, it's the male gaze throughout. And I just, I found it, you know, reading it in a, in a chilly, you know, London January, on the quite 1940s-esque northern line, back from work every night with the shadows closing in. Oh, I found it a pretty bleak read.

• 17:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh no, this is shocking.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  We'll explore that a bit more later, the the the idea of kind of perhaps the sexism in nineteen eighty four. But first of all, talk about George Orwell, your your hero.

• 17:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, so the funny thing about Orwell is Orwell is renowned for his clarity and his honesty and his sympathy for the underdog and his hostility to authority. But there's an irony here because he's a son of empire, it's a son of privilege, and he's a former imperial policeman who writes under a name not his own. So his name is actually Eric Arthur Blair. Um, so he's born in Bengal in nineteen oh three, his father was in the Indian civil service and he basically worked as a on the export of opium. His family, interestingly, he describes them um famously as lower, upper, middle class, Orwell was fascinated by class. Basically because his his family were Gentile, but they didn't have the money to sustain it.

• 18:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  So that meant that there's always a huge or a widening gap between their expectations and their capacity to pay for them. And that meant that Orwell reflected a lot about the sort of social caste and so on. He's a very bright boy, he wins a scholarship to prep school and then another scholarship to Eton, um a King Scholarship to Eton, where he was taught French by Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  That is a great detail, though, the two kind of fathers of dystopian literature.

• 18:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, so um he wasn't a great star at Eton. Uh, his parents thought that he probably wouldn't win a scholarship to university and they didn't have the money to send him. So they applied for him to join the Indian Imperial Police, which he does. He passes the exam, he goes off to Burma and some of his biographers see Burma as formative for him because of course Burma, you know, he has an experience of repression and punishments and surveillance, but he's on the other side of that equation because he's working for the authorities.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, and he he really doesn't enjoy Burma, does he?

• 19:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, not at all. I think he finds it very awkward. He wrote brilliantly, by the way, about his time in Burma. There's a brilliant essay about shooting an elephant and everyone's sort of staring at him. And the sort of pressure that he felt as the representative of imperial authority, surrounded by all these people whose lives he didn't really understand.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  So that's why, I guess, he went back to England eventually in nineteen twenty eight. And then that's when he first had a stab at becoming a writer.

• 19:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  And a big, big change. He lived mainly in a sort of sleepy Sussex seaside town called Southwold. And that's where his family retired to. And that's when he takes the name George Orwell, and he takes it from the king.

• 19:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, George.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  Patriotic, yeah, a good patriotic man. And then the local river, because he sees it as a solid English name. And then he really gives the writing his best shot. And he writes Down and Out in Paris and London, and that's published in nineteen thirty three, and then Four Books after that. So There's Burmese Days, A Clergymen's Daughter, Keep the Aspidastra Flying and Coming Up for Air. And none of these are very successful. And let's face it, we probably wouldn't know them well today if it hadn't been for his later works.

• 20:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  The common theme of those books is there's a central character who's trapped by his times. He feels it's very claustrophobic. And the character tries to escape and basically fails. So this is a constant theme for Orwell. And I think that reflects, I mean, obviously the theme of nineteen eighty four, and I think that reflects his personality. He's shaped very much by the establishment, but also he's quite thoughtful, he's spiky, he's awkward, he's kind of a man apart. He likes to see himself as a man apart. Anyway, the paradox is, on the one hand, he's quite anti-authority, anti-establishment, but on the other, you know, he's very loyal to his old school friends. So the people at his bedside when he was dying were all Oldertonians. They were the people he kept in touch with all his life.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  And that's led some people to think retrospectively that he might have been gay, hasn't it?

• 21:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  I can't believe that people think that. Well, I can believe that people think it, but I think they're deluded. I mean, one of the great criticisms of Orwell now is that Orwell, you know, is no woman is safe from George Orwell. He's the sort of pouring feebly at them, or he's asking them to marry him. Anyway, talking about asking her to marry him, he does get married in 1936 to Eileen O'Shaughnessy, who is Oxford educated and basically becomes his typist. And then at the end of 1936, the defining political event of his life, he goes off to the Spanish Civil War. Before then, I think Orwell had, I mean, he'd been interested in politics, but he hadn't been fundamentally political. And the Spanish Civil War changes that. He volunteers for the Republicans, the left wing forces.

• 21:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  He joins a militia called the Poom, but what really is so formative is that the left wing forces in Spain are fighting among themselves. So there's a rift in Barcelona where he's been very excited and happy. There's a big rift between, on the one hand, all these different kind of sectarian militias like the Poom.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then the other, the Orthodox Communists. And the Orthodox kind of Stalinist Communists basically stamp on these other militias. And Orwell is really shocked by this. He's shocked by Stalinism. He's shocked by the experience of kind of truth and language being threatened by propaganda and by kind of totalitarian orthodoxy. And, and, and, and that stays with him politically forever. And that gives him his obsession, I think, with totalitarianism and with Stalinism.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Stalinism, I mean Stalin's shadow looms large in 1984. And obviously Big Brother, I mean, he's not, he's not entirely Stalin, like as we said, you know, the shadows of Hitler and him. But the similarities between Stalin and Big Brother are impossible to miss, I would say. I mean, the moustache is not alone. There's more than that as well.

• 22:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, so the moustache is definitely giveaway because it's definitely Stalin's moustache and not Hitler's.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  And the description of the face, kind of raggedly, solidly handsome.

• 22:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly. But also the way in which, in the history books, we discover, they've been constantly rewritten to emphasize the role of Big Brother and to push Big Brother back earlier and earlier into the beginning of the revolution. And this is of course exactly what Stalin's court historians did with him. They wrote out the other leaders of the Russian Revolution and put Stalin centre stage. And there's also a lot of stuff, I mean, when Orwell has come back, when he comes back to England, um, this is the point at which- Stalin's show trials are being reported. So people like Krugeriznoviev or Lev Kamenev or Nikolai Bukharin, the so-called old Bolsheviks, they are being dragged in front of the courts in Moscow in these terrible show trials. And that the shadow of the show trials hangs

• 23:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  over 1984 and there's three characters, Aaronson, Jones and Rutherford, in the book, who are basically like the old Bolsheviks of airstrip one. And the same thing, exactly the same thing happens to them.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they disappeared, aren't they?

• 23:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So I hope you enjoyed that clip from our episode on 1984. To hear more, if you want to hear more, and I hope you do, then please search for the book club wherever you get your podcasts.