Orwell's fear that his books would be used for rightwing propaganda has come true DJ Taylor

I was so absorbed in the spectacle of Elon Musk's video-link harangue to the Unite the Kingdom rally last weekend - one of those performances that managed to be absurd and terrifying at the same time - that it took me a moment to register the slogan on his T-shirt.

- DJ Taylor

But no, there it was, a stark, four-word enquiry accompanied by a menacing Big Brother-style eye: “What would Orwell think?” The irony of a man who may be regarded as the 21st century's leading demagogue invoking the 20th century’s greatest exposé of demagoguery in his own support may have escaped Mr Musk, but it will have been painfully apparent to anyone who has ever mused over the prophetic qualities of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

So, leaving aside the fact that all speculation about the dead is ultimately profitless, what would Orwell think? What, in particular, would he think of Elon Musk?

One thing he certainly thought as Nineteen Eighty-Four inched towards publication in the summer of 1949 was that the novel would be used as a propaganda tool by the American Right. The final volume of his Collected Works contains a “statement”, circulated in the US, in which Orwell confirms that the novel is not an attack on socialism but a “show-up” of totalitarianism per se, and among the many cares that oppressed him as he went to his death in January 1950 was an awareness of the malign uses to which the book would be put by people he regarded as his political opponents.

By and large these fears were realised. Three-quarters of a century later, if the American left (with one or two pointed exceptions) rates Orwell as a good guy, then the American right sees him as a kind of secular saint, a lightning rod for all the ills that oppress our fraught and contested planet.