Guardian Angel: My Story, My Britain
Melanie Phillips
emBooks, 128pp, £7.20 (ebook)
When I worked at the Daily Mail – I know, I’m sorry, please put down the pitchfork! – we had a running joke. Every week, we ran a “Saturday essay” and we discovered that, whatever the ostensible subject of this 1,800-word tract, it could always fit under the headline “The great betrayal”.
It’s tempting to suggest that this explains why Melanie Phillips found the paper to be such an agreeable home after 21 years working on the Guardian and the Observer. Despite her success and public profile – she has appeared on Question Time twice as often in the past 18 months as all of Britain’s scientists put together – Phillips feels betrayed, marginalised and vilified. She is a lone voice crying in the wilderness as hordes of lefties dominate the airwaves and newspapers, urging the destruction of the family, pushing the myth of climate change and insisting on compulsory gayness lessons for under-fives.
Does this sound like a Britain you recognise? It doesn’t to me and, as I read further through this book, I began to feel that Phillips was that most postmodern of literary devices – an unreliable narrator. She clearly describes the facts and then leaps to a conclusion so unexpected, so different to the one I would draw, that I feel breathless.
For example, after Phillips begins to write columns about education at the Guardian, she receives many letters disagreeing with her – although those that agree often mention that theirs is the minority view and they are afraid to challenge the consensus. She concludes: “What was being described was more akin to life in a totalitarian state. Dissent was being silenced, and those who ran against the orthodoxy were being forced to operate in secret.” Now, I know that rightwingers like to mock the Guardian’s relatively low circulation figures but writing a column there is hardly “operating in secret”. And where are all the columns supporting progressive ideas in the Mail? Or is it only “silencing dissent” when left-wing papers have an editorial line?
There are several incidents like this, in which Phillips recounts how oppressed she was by the Guardianistas, followed swiftly by the flat assertion that she was then appointed leader writer, news editor, columnist or editor of an environmental supplement (even after telling her then editor, Peter Preston, that she believed there was no evidence for man-made climate change).
The vocabulary of this book – “shibboleths”, “hate-mongering”, “denounced”, “besmirch”, “mind-bending” – suggests that she enjoys extreme adversarialism, even while raging against it. Finally, when she leaves the Observer – not before applying to be its editor – for the Sunday Times, she quickly becomes bored with not being attacked: “It just wasn’t where the action was because it was not in the front line of the culture war. My place was on the front line.”
This is a fascinating psychological portrait of a woman who seems to feel most alive when under fire. The chapters about her family – her controlling mother and passive father, her monstrous grandmother, suspected of being partially responsible for the death of her aunt – would provide fodder for an army of therapists. So read it and politely disagree. Phillips would hate that.
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