Will Riots In France Lead To The Rise Of The Far Right?

In 1940 PG Wodehouse was (as he might be) spending the summer in Le Touquet, when he found himself surrounded by German troops and interned. Naively, he agreed to be interviewed by a Nazi propaganda team about his internment, and the subsequent diffusion of this led some in England to denounce Wodehouse as a traitor. He was stoutly backed by the likes of George Orwell (who wrote an essay ‘In defence of PG Wodehouse), but Wodehouse’s denigrators left him disenchanted by England and he spent much of the rest of his life in the US.

There should have been little doubt as to where Wodehouse stood on fascism. His 1938 book ‘The Code of the Woosters’ is famous for his comic undermining of the character Spode, a black shorted fascist, most likely modelled on Oswald Mosley.