We know how the story starts: on a bright cold day in April as the clocks are striking 13. We know how the story ends: in the basement of the ministry of love with a cage full of starving rats. And we probably feel like we know what the story means, what it’s saying, what it’s warning us about. Yet here we are, the story is happening again, and in a different way: in a hospital in Scotland, with a dying man, and a fascist doctor. It is unexpected.

I wonder, as it gets going, this brand new version, if it can have anything left to say, or at least anything surprising. Everyone has read the book, and everyone’s familiar with its dark and disturbing iconography: Big Brother, Room 101, the Thought Police. These are the phrases we use to talk about the state we’re in. They form the questions we ask. Has fiction become fact? In what ways is 2026 like 1984? How Orwellian are we really?

In some ways, it feels like parts of our lives have been a bit post-1984 and Orwellian for a long time. One other fact everyone knows about 1984 is that it was written on Jura, and years later, when he was 70 years old, Orwell’s son Richard Blair made a pilgrimage back to the island. I spoke to him about it and he said Jura had been a happy time for him and his father but that the book that emerged was ultimately about a dark, unhappy subject that’s been written about since time immemorial: abuse of power. “My father was also writing about surveillance and CCTV,” Richard said. “And that prediction was pretty much spot-on and will probably never change.”

If you doubt it, I refer you to the news story that’s running in the week the new........

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