‘The Enemy of Nonsense’

George Orwell, who wrote for The Observer, described it as “the enemy of nonsense”. Now, more than ever, it has a job to do.     James Harding, Editor-in-Chief

It was with great interest I read James Harding’s note after the merger of The Observer with Tortoise Media back in April this year. Harding not only evoked the authority of Orwell, he channelled the legendary David Astor by quoting extensively from “the great editor and owner” of The Observer, promising to “do all we can to uphold those values and live up to those principles”.

Orwell and Astor, very commendable journalistic role models. Tick.

I did wonder about that quote though and scoured my copy of Orwell: The Observer Years  searching for it. There was one reference to ’nonsense’ but nothing at all describing the newspaper in the way Harding suggested in his editorial note. I searched the relevant volumes in The Complete Works of George Orwell without success. No biographer of either man appears to have mentioned the quote. My careful searches of The Observer archives proved fruitless. There was nothing in either Astor’s or Orwell’s correspondence or diaries.

After spending so much time reading Astor’s correspondence, memos and editorials over the last few years – photographing many unpublished letters from various archives – I held some hope that a text search of my iPhone camera roll would bring some joy. Nope.

I asked the most knowledgeable people in my network of Orwell experts. It became clear that several had also wondered about the source of the quote. One friend told me he had emailed The Observer enquiring about the source and received no response.

Oddly, the only references that came readily to hand when I searched back in May was a brief mention in the The 26th Annual of the Best of British Advertising (1988) and by The One Show, a Swiss television program whose contemporary website claims it is the “world’s most prestigious award show in advertising and design”. It was a complete mystery as both quoted The Observer claiming that Orwell described the newspaper as ‘the enemy of nonsense’.

Journalists I respected had gone on strike in protest at the sale of The Observer to Tortoise Media. Surely a new editor, seeking to build authority after such a controversial merger would not employ a fake quote made into a logo?

I let it go.

Some months rolled by with The Observer continuing to employ the logo prominently. Did this mean it was legitimate? Surely if it was not authentic someone in the British media industry would have pointed it out?

Last month, I made the pilgrimage from Australia to the Northern Hemisphere to conduct Orwell research and two events coalesced, motivating me to try again to solve the puzzle and find the source of the quote.

Firstly, following-up previous research, I read a great deal more correspondence related to David Astor’s conscientious labours to employ a team of writers who could make The Observer the premier newspaper it was to become. I found more letters, a diary and other documents (in Wales & Austria) which appear to be unknown to scholars of Astor, Orwell & The Observer.

Secondly, completely motivated by this archival gold, Astor was occupying my thoughts when a podcast auto-played on my app. Several ex-Observer journalists were interviewed about their new project by Alan Rusbridger; there was discussion of the merger.

It seemed important to try and find the source.

I tried a new approach. When had the phrase first appeared in any context in The Observer?

The first reference was in a completely un-related article from 1967. The headline, ‘Did a captive Saxon girl wear this brooch in Arthur’s fortress?’ tells you all you need to know about why the director of an archaeological excavation – who rebutted the claim – was described as an ‘ardent enemy of nonsense’.

However, more to the point a new editor, Donald Trelford, on David Astor’s retirement wrote in 1976:

A CHANGE of Editor provides a good opportunity for a newspaper to restate its policy and aims…

The task of an independent newspaper is to chip away at such prejudices, to be the enemy of nonsense from any quarter, no matter how fashionable, to raise the unpalatable issues and to encourage politicians to deal with them.

There is no mention of Orwell though.

Advertising Campaign

Continuing to just search for the phrase resulted in discovering an eccentric column in The Spectator from December 1987 by Peregrine Worsthorne :

I wonder whether the Observer is right to boast in its new advertising campaign that the paper is ‘the enemy of nonsense’, while making use to do so of Edward Lear, that greatest nonsense poet of all time.

Worsthorne’s egocentric analysis is almost as nonsensical as anything Edward Lear could have produced. He concluded his column by saying:

David Astor, under whose editorship the Observer reached great heights, was not afraid of nonsense. Indeed he had an unerring eye for it. So should any editor who wants good journalism since the paper that is the enemy of nonsense will soon become the enemy of truth.

However, thanks to Worsthorne’s column, the fog cleared considerably.

The Observer had commissioned a forty-second television commercial (which explains the advertising references mentioned earlier in the post) which screened from late 1987 into early 1988. The Guardian Archive has recordings of the test versions which I watched with great interest today.

In the broadcast version, you will see that Lear’s nonsense poems have been overdubbed onto several politician’s speeches. The advertisment then concludes with the voice-over, “When George Orwell wrote for the Observer, he called it ‘the enemy of nonsense'”. There is an accompanying image of the newspaper with the written tagline, “the enemy of nonsense”.

This is the first time Orwell’s name is connected to the phrase.

In 1991, Trelford was editorialising:

In my view, as I put it at the time of the paper’s 10,000th issue in 1983, an inner consistency can be detected through The Observer’s chequered past. Part of this consistency is in trying to look at things anew and not being a slave to what was said before, even by us; trying not to ‘con’ readers into believing that all problems have easy solutions; and that we always know what they are; being reasonable even if we cannot always be right; having an instinctive feeling for the underdog; giving off ‘a strong whiff of idealism’ that attracts some people and irritates others; caring more than some for the written word; trying harder than others to be open-minded; not recoiling from the awkward truth when we see it; being, in Orwell’s phrase (himself an Observer writer) the ‘enemy of nonsense’, especially our own.

Trelford also wrote later in the same year saying it was “a phrase Orwell used about the paper”.

On April 25th 1993, Jonathan Fenby, the new editor, takes up the mantle:

Why is the newspaper vulnerable? It is not simply a matter of circulation — newspaper economics are more complex than that. At 533,000 copies a week (the latest audited six-monthly figure) we already outsell the Times, Guardian, Independent, Independent on Sunday and Financial Times. The reason is that, uniquely, we stand alone on a Sunday, unattached to any daily newspaper group. That gives us an unobscured weekly editorial focus denied to our rivals, but it also means that we carry seven-day overheads for one-day publication. If we had the same commercial overheads as our rivals, we should be in profit.

If Lonrho were to sell The Observer — and the if must be stressed — we do not believe that they would do so without safeguarding the newspaper’s future and ensuring that its most precious asset, its distinctive voice and values forged over two centuries of publication, were maintained. Those traditions were established in the very first edition on 4 December, 1791, when the paper proclaimed a commitment to ‘the free communication of the truth . . . unbiased by prejudice, uninfluenced by party’. As George Orwell put it when he wrote for The Observer: ‘It is the enemy of nonsense.’

So it goes. A television commercial had transformed the quote into an authentic one uttered by George Orwell, sage.

On 26 May 1996, there was a return to using the phrase without Orwell’s name attached to it:

Above all, in her unpretentious, pomposity-pricking photographs, taken in daylight, in a few minutes, without assistants, Jane Bown has managed to be what David Astor believed the Observer should always aim to be: an enemy of nonsense. In her unspoken mission of demystification, the Observer, down to its very name, has been her perfect accomplice.

Jane Bown, the author of the piece was also the photographer who shot what is possibly the best known image of Astor. It seems more likely that Astor coined the phrase, although, possibly it was something Orwell had said to him. There is certainly no written evidence that Orwell was the source!

Reflection

James Harding concluded his editorial on the 26th April this year with the following observation:

‘We think observers are needed. Journalism, as Astor liked to say, is too important and interesting to be left to journalists. We hope that our readers, as your time and enthusiasm allows, will bring your experience and expertise to helping us get to a better understanding of issues, ideas and each other.’

It has been three weeks since I emailed the Reader’s Editor. No response yet but I will follow-up and send this link. I trust my observations, ‘time and enthusiasm’ will be received in that spirit.

In my perfect world, the source of the quote is revealed to be Orwell rather than a television commercial.

*Fingers crossed*

FEATURED IMAGE: The Observer, ‘The enemy of nonsense’, 23 November 2025, p.3

References

BOOTH, Edward, 1988 British Design and Art Direction: The 26th Annual of the Best of British Advertising, Television, Graphic, Product and Editorial Design, and the International Section. Polygon Editions, 1988

Bown, Jane, ‘To add that only Italians put the tw’ The Observer, 26 May, 1996, p. 12

Cockett, Richard, David Astor and The Observer, Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1992

Dunn, Cyril, ‘Did a captive Saxon girl wear this brooch in Arthur’s fortress?’, The Observer, 30 July, 1967, p. 7

Fenby, Jonathan, ‘About ourselves’, The Observer, 25 April, 1993, p. 22

Orwell, George, The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volumes 13-20, Davison, Peter (ed.) London: Secker & Warburg, 1998

Lewis, Jeremy, David Astor, Random Books: Kindle Edition, 2017

The One Show, Switzerland: Rotovision, 1989

Trelford, Donald, ‘Ourselves’, The Observer, 4 January, 1976, p. 6

Trelford, Donald, ‘Observing from Mozart to Major’, The Observer, 6 January, 1991, p. 16

Trelford, Donald, ‘Freedom of choice’, The Observer, 1 December, 1991, p. 24

Worsthorne, Peregrine, ‘Diary’, The Spectator, 19 December, 1987, p. 8