Jeremy Corbyn must wonder why more people don’t embrace socialism. “You care for each other, you care for everybody, and everybody cares for everyone else,” he once told an interviewer. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

Somehow, however, millions of voters seem immune to socialism’s appeal. The problem is hardly new. George Orwell wrote about it 80 years ago in The Road to Wigan Pier, which I happened to be rereading this week.

“Socialism is such elementary common sense,” wrote Orwell, “that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already.” The working class, he said, “ought to be flocking” to the socialist cause. And yet, to Orwell’s frustration, they weren’t. Why not?

One major reason, he argued, was that the working class were being “driven away” by a certain type of socialist – a type they believed to be utterly out of touch with their lives, views and interests. Orwell agreed. This type of socialist, he complained bitterly, was “bearded”, “vegetarian”, “teetotal”, “prim”, “middle-class”, “a crank” and “a pacifist”.

I’m sure that description reminds me of someone. But for the life of me I can’t think who.

Up in arms

When the masses do finally rise up and put him in Number 10, the Labour leader has revealed that he will appoint a Minister for Peace and a Minister for Disarmament. Their job, he said this week, will be to “pursue these things around the world”.