The statue least likely to need Sadiq Khan’s protective box is, surely, that of George Orwell alongside Broadcasting House. But we should remove half his halo – the half smirching the name he began life with, Eric Blair. The Blairs were enriched, generations back, by slave-trade investment. Eric’s father worked in the Indian Opium Office – one of the filthier commerces of the British Empire. Indentured Indians grew opium for export to China which was, thanks to Queen Victoria’s gunboats, epidemically addicted. In return, as the biggest drug dealer in history, Great Britain got silken underwear, its national beverage and the delicate china in which to serve it. And Hong Kong. Meanwhile Eric Blair’s maternal family had for three generations lived by plundering Burma’s forests for their teak. That Master Blair was educated at Eton was thanks to opium traffic and teak-theft. On leaving Eton, for reasons no biographer (I’m one) can explain, Blair signed up with the Indian Police force in Burma for five years. He was not there directing traffic or shooting wayward elephants. The police kept the Burmese down for the timber industry and, in Blair’s day, “Burmah Oil” (Denis Thatcher’s firm, you’ll recall). “I did terrible things in Burma,” Blair told a friend. The Burmese have a joke that George Orwell’s first novel (Burmese Days) is about Burma and so is his last: Nineteen Eighty-Four. Eric Blair came home, and something wonderful happened. He became George Orwell, and remade himself into the greatest truth-teller of his age. Orwell deserves his half halo. But not Eric Blair.