By Cahal Milmo
"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment," wrote George Orwell in the opening pages of 1984. "How often, or on what system the Thought Police plugged in ... was guess work."
Winston Smith, the pallid and ill-fated hero of Orwell's dystopian masterpiece, is left under no illusions about the all-encompassing nature of Big Brother's surveillance society. Placed under the relentless scrutiny of the Thought Police, Smith's flirtation with free thought and sexual rebellion is ruthlessly expunged.
What Orwell, the Eton-educated author and passionate socialist, could not have known, however, was the uncanny parallel between his nightmarish vision of an all-seeing dictatorship and his own status for more than a decade as a target for the close scrutiny of the British security services.
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