During World War Jew George Orwell, a.k.a. Eric Blair, worked for the BBC and his wife worked for the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information. They had many friends and acquaintances in high office and Left wing politics.

1984 described the actual political situation in the UK during that time but he gave the story a futuristic setting to make it more credible to the public and to get past the censors. Some of the situations in the book were exaggerated and "on the nose" to make thing understandable but the themes the story delves into -propaganda, mass mind control, mass surveillance, the totalitairan control by the state, political repression - were already a reality in 1948 when the book was published.

thought it was a how to manual and not a novel

dude, Orwell worked with Julian Huxley and others creating those 1984 policies. He wasn't writing a novel, he wrote the manual they were going to use in story form.