When did Offical Double-think start

The first time I became aware of this was was the sell-off i.e Tory Government invoked privatisation of British Telecom in November in 1984. Most people would acknowledge that if you sell e.g a bike for £100 and the next day the person you sold the bike to immediately sells it for £135 then basically you sold it for a lot less than it was worth i.e a pretty bad piece of work. If you tried to argue seriously that selling it at £100 was fine and you had not made any sort of  mistake, I personally doubt you would get much support except perhaps from sympathetic friends and even they may suspect you were perhaps a bit in denial..

However that's one aspect of what happened with the public BT shares sell off but in on a scale of £Billions and with the extra absurdity of pretty much everyone knowing before the sell off that BT was being sold off at a fraction of what it was worth. The Orwellian double think aspect was compounded by the government calling those who bought the undervalued shares as Shareholders with the associated positive connotations of investment when in fact pretty much everyone knew the majority of private individual purchasers had no intention whatsoever of holding long term shares but would sell them quickly as a "nice little earner" - nothing to do with investment and very much to with short term speculation.

This happened under Mrs "where there is discord may we bring harmony."Thatcher and her Conservative and Unionist party. It was followed by a series of privatisations all of which sold off state assets for substantially less then they could have been as evidenced by in most cases rapid large increases in their share price, but still presented by the government as "successes". Not alas that dissimilar a story to that of the ongoing debacle of PFIs and PPPs instigated under New Labour by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to avoid being publicly perceived as raising taxes - now that's another story.