Melanie Phillips
Melanie Phillips (born 4 June 1951) is a British public commentator. She began her career writing for The Guardian and New Statesman. During the 1990s, she came to identify with ideas more associated with right-wing politics and the far-right[1][2][3][4][5][6] and currently writes for The Times, The Jerusalem Post, and The Jewish Chronicle, covering political and social issues from a socially conservative perspective. Phillips, quoting Irving Kristol, defines herself as a liberal who has "been mugged by reality".[7]
Melanie Phillips
4 June 1951
- Journalist
- author
- publisher
- The Times columnist
- Former columnist for
The Guardian, The Spectator
and the Daily Mail - Author of Londonistan
2
Phillips has appeared as a panellist on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Moral Maze and BBC One's Question Time. She was awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 1996, while she was writing for The Observer.[8] Her books include the memoir Guardian Angel: My Story, My Britain.[9]
Early life[edit]
Melanie Phillips was born in Hammersmith, the daughter of Mabel (née Cohen) and Alfred Phillips.[10] Her family is Jewish and emigrated to Britain from Poland and Russia.[11] According to her autobiography, the name "Phillips" was imposed by British officials who were unable to pronounce her family's Polish name. She describes her family as poor people living as outsiders in an impoverished area of London, who "kept their heads down and tried to assimilate by aping the class mannerisms of the English."[12] Her father, Alfred, was a dress salesman, while her mother, Mabel, ran a children's clothes shop and both were committed Labour voters.[7] She has stated that her father was "gentle, kind and innocent", an "overgrown child", and that "as my other parent he just wasn't there", which taught her "how the absence of proper fathering could screw up a child for life".[11] She was educated at Putney High School, a girls' fee-paying independent school in Putney, London. Later she read English at St Anne's College, Oxford.[13]
Journalism career[edit]
Phillips trained as a journalist on the Evening Echo, a local newspaper in Hemel Hempstead.[7] After winning the Young Journalist of the Year award in 1976,[7] she spent a short period at the New Society magazine.
She joined The Guardian newspaper in 1977, becoming its social services correspondent and social policy leader writer. In 1984, she became the paper's news editor,[7] and was reported to have fainted on her first day.[14] In 1982, she defended the Labour Party at the time of the split with the Social Democratic Party. Her opinion column began in 1987. While working for The Guardian, Phillips was persuaded by Julia Pascal to write a play called Traitors, which Pascal then directed.[15] It was performed at the Drill Hall from January 1986. The play was set at the time of the 1982 Lebanon War and centred around the moral dilemmas of a Jewish journalist who as political editor of a liberal magazine has to decide whether to veto an article written in anti-semitic tones, and also whether she is right to publish a leaked document about the Falklands War. The play was reviewed by John Peter in The Sunday Times as "a play of blistering intelligence and fearless moral questioning", although he considered it bordering on implausible.[16] According to Phillips, writing in December 2017, it was the only positive review the play received.[15] Phillips left The Guardian in 1993, saying that her relationship with the paper and its readers had become "like a really horrific family argument".[7] She took her opinion column to The Guardian's sister-paper The Observer, then to The Sunday Times in 1998,[14] before beginning her association with the tabloid Daily Mail in 2001. She also wrote for The Jewish Chronicle, The Jerusalem Post and other periodicals.
In November 2010, The Spectator and Phillips apologised and agreed to pay substantial compensation and legal costs to a prominent British Muslim they falsely accused of antisemitism.[17] The following year, she resigned from the magazine after it apologised and paid compensation for another of her pieces which, it said, contained an allegation that was "completely false".[18]
Since 2003, she has written a blog, once hosted by The Spectator, but following her resignation from the magazine in June 2011,[18][19] it is hosted on her website.[20] In September 2013, it emerged that her Mail column was to end, although according to Phillips, the newspaper wanted her to continue to write features and other articles for it.[21]
In 2013, she launched an e-book publishing company called emBooks, to promote her book, together with several others, and self-promotional merchandise to the US market.[22] She currently writes for The Times.[23]
She had a weekly radio show on Voice of Israel, is a regular panellist on BBC Radio's The Moral Maze and appears frequently on BBC TV's signature political shows Question Time and The Daily Politics.