Students are also urged "to use as many interesting verbs, adjectives and adverbs as you can" and "to show off some vocabulary". Examples of truly dreadful prose are provided for students to emulate in pursuit of top marks. The emphasis on emotion, personal anecdote, and the profligate use of adjectives, adverbs, similes and metaphors is bad enough. Far worse is the teaching that truth and accuracy are optional. Let's now return to political writing. Journalists in the post-war epoch were not celebrities. They were classified according to function. Thus Hugh Massingham, founder of the modern political column, was known to readers of the Observer only as "Our Political Correspondent". First bylines became usual, picture bylines followed, and finally celebrity columnists emerged.

These changes accompanied powerful movements in society: the collapse of political parties as mass movements; the emergence of celebrity politicians; the decline of church-going; the growth of advertising (which, along with screenwriting for film and television, gave modern writers and politicians alike a masterclass in conveying emotions in a short space, with little language); the expectation of continual improvement and personal gratification in people's lifestyles; the return of private wealth and inequality on a scale not even seen in Edwardian times.  

To be fair, Orwell's famous essay had an effect. Thanks to him, even today's journalists use fewer clichés and are less likely to use abstract words or long-winded formulations to obscure meaning. No comparable essay written in the last hundred years has been more influential, or done more good.

However, Orwell's task was comparatively easy. He was challenging the kind of prose that was produced by authoritarian political systems and their ideologues, or by powerful bureaucracies. The new barbarism in our common language, disseminated through marketing, nurtured by social media and increasingly taught in schools, is part of the spirit of the age itself.

As Orwell noted, writing does more than reflect the society that we live in. It helps to create it because it forms the kind of people that we become. The narcissism of so much public discourse makes rational debate almost impossible. All discussion becomes a parade of feelings, crowding out any analysis of effects. Political writing is collapsing into autobiography. This is turning us into smaller, trivial, selfish people. It is doing great damage to the public domain. Political writers should offer a window, not a mirror, to the world.