Melanie Phillips

Melanie Phillips (born 4 June 1951) is a British journalist, author, and 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 the right and currently writes for ''The Times'', ''The Jerusalem Post'', and ''The Jewish Chronicle'', covering political and social issues from a social conservative perspective. Phillips, quoting Irving Kristol, defines herself as a liberal who has "been mugged by reality".Andy Becket
"The changing face of Melanie Phillips"
''The Guardian'', 7 March 2003.

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''. Her books include the memoir ''Guardian Angel: My Story, My Britain''.

Early life

Melanie Phillips was born in Hammersmith, the daughter of Mabel (née Cohen) and Alfred Phillips. Her family is Jewish and emigrated to Britain from Poland and Russia. According to her account, 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".Daily Mail article
/ref> Her father, Alfred, was a dress salesman, while her mother, Mabel, ran a children's clothes shop and both were committed Labour voters. 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". 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.

Journalism career

Phillips trained as a journalist on the ''Evening Echo'', a local newspaper in Hemel Hempstead. After winning the Young Journalist of the Year award in 1976, 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, and was reported to have fainted on her first day.Peter Hillmor
"NS Profile - Melanie Phillips"
''New Statesman'', 10 March 2003 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. 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. According to Phillips, writing in December 2017, it was the only positive review the play received. Phillips left ''The Guardian'' in 1993, saying that her relationship with the paper and its readers had become "like a really horrific family argument", and that she had seen the "reality" that "the west ha lost its moral compass". She took her opinion column to ''The Guardian'' sister-paper ''The Observer'', then to ''The Sunday Times'' in 1998, 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. 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".

Since 2003, she has written a blog, once hosted by ''The Spectator'', but following her resignation from the magazine in June 2011, it is hosted on her website. 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.

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. She currently writes for ''The Times''.

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''.

Views and opinions

The BBC has said that Phillips "is regarded as one of the ritishmedia's leading right-wing voices" and a "controversial" columnist. Nick Cohen wrote in 2011 that she has become vilified by ''The Guardian''. Phillips herself stated in 2006, during an interview with Jackie Ashley for the newspaper, that it often misrepresents her opinions.

International issues

Islam

Phillips was heavily criticised for an article she wrote in ''The Jewish Chronicle'' which suggested that "the taunt of Islamophobia is used to silence any criticism of the Islamic world, including Islamic extremism" and "facilitates" antisemitism. The newspaper's editor, while not offering regret for publishing the article, did acknowledge that the article had been divisive and apologised to readers who had been angered or upset by the piece. Simon Kuper, writing in the ''Financial Times'', described her in 2011 as an advocate for the Eurabia conspiracy theory.

Iran

She is a staunch critic of Iran and has written and spoken frequently about the threat she perceives it to be, particularly if it were to obtain nuclear weapons. The Iranian regime, she writes, "has seen itself at war with the west ever since it came to power in 1979, and which has been involved in arguably every major terrorist atrocity against it". In her view, Iran's leaders are "religious fanatics" who are "impervious to reason" and who "would be happy" to bring about an apocalyptic end of days. Thus, "there is no alternative to force if it is to be stopped." She has drawn criticism for her hard-line approach from ''The Guardian'' commentators.

Israel

Phillips's criticisms of liberal Jews who disagree with her positions on Israel have been mocked or condemned by writers such as Alan Dershowitz, Rabbi David Goldberg, and Jonathan Freedland, who criticised Phillips's labelling of Independent Jewish Voices, a group of liberal Jews, as "Jews For Genocide". Freedland wrote in ''The Jewish Chronicle'': "Now, as it happens, I have multiple criticisms of IJV ... but even their most trenchant opponents must surely blanch at the notion that these critics of Israel and of Anglo-Jewish officialdom are somehow in favour of genocide—literally, eager to see the murder and eradication of the Jewish people ... it is an absurdity, one that drains the word 'genocide' of any meaning".

United States

Early in the presidency of Barack Obama, Phillips accused him of "adopting the agenda of the Islamist" and of being "firmly in the Islamists' camp". Shortly after Obama's re-election for a second term, Phillips said that "Four years ago, America put into the White House a sulky narcissist with an unbroken history of involvement in thuggish, corrupt, far-left, black power, Jew-bashing, west-hating politics". She warned that Obama would lead America into a "terrifying darkness". ''The Independent'' termed it "rather odd" and an "angry rant", which "sparked debate on Twitter".

Phillips wrote in defence of president-elect Donald Trump on 14 November 2016: "Believing the smears they have created, the Trumpophobes then smear the public for voting for the man they have thus smeared. This, of course, is precisely why millions voted against the liberal establishment and for Trump, as well as for Brexit, in the first place".

A year later she criticised Trump for retweeting videos from Britain First's leader Jayda Fransen

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