It's more like praising with faint damn, I think. Orwell was a man of the pretty-far left. The public-school class system must have been anathema to him (at the same time as he was a product of Eton—where, by the way, fellow future anti-utopian novelist Aldous Huxley was his French teacher) and yet he presents Wodehouse not as any kind of villain but just hapless and obsolete. So obsolete that you'd never guess that Wodehouse would outlive Orwell himself by 25 years.

This article might have been as much of a defence as it was politically possible for Orwell to produce in 1945. Even his famous independence from sectarianism must have had its limits. I also think one can put one's finger on why Orwell was so sympathetic to Wodehouse and so willing to judge him softly: they were both profoundly and essentially English. People have often pointed this out about Orwell, saying for example that his deep Englishness was the wellspring of his immunity to ideology. I think that same quality is probably what resonated with Orwell about Wodehouse - he was sympathetic in the literal sense (having similar feelings). There are moments in this article where it's as if he's reading Wodehouse from within.