Melanie Phillips: Truth, justice and the Melanie way

Lambasted as a right-winger, turncoat and beyond the pale, how does Melanie Phillips describe herself? Liberal and progressive, she tells James Silver

Her foes - and there are many - caricature her as a right-wing harpy with unpalatable opinions, but Melanie Phillips is having none of it. Indeed, the Daily Mail columnist and The Moral Maze panellist, who is invariably cast as the voice of "the right" on television and radio debates, considers herself a liberal. "I don't care for labels," she bristles, "but I am a progressive. Despite the way I am depicted, I am certainly not 'of the right'."

Her foes - and there are many - caricature her as a right-wing harpy with unpalatable opinions, but Melanie Phillips is having none of it. Indeed, the Daily Mail columnist and The Moral Maze panellist, who is invariably cast as the voice of "the right" on television and radio debates, considers herself a liberal. "I don't care for labels," she bristles, "but I am a progressive. Despite the way I am depicted, I am certainly not 'of the right'."

With six million Daily Mail readers and a take-no-prisoners writing style, Phillips has become one of Britain's most influential and provocative columnists, leading some well-placed observers to say that she is viewed at the Mail as a strident voice to "replace" the popular late columnist Lynda Lee-Potter, whose memorial service was held last week. Like Lee-Potter, Phillips is said to be a favourite of Paul Dacre, the Daily Mail chief. When asked about this, she will only say: "They are giant shoes for anyone to fill."

Owlish, in rimless spectacles, and stylishly dressed, Phillips cuts an intense figure in person, with a tone of voice that is shot through with unwavering moral certainty. She has a rare ability to rile and stir on any number of issues. She backed the Iraq war, but describes Tony Blair as "a fantasist". Gordon Brown is fingered for "ruining the fabric of the nation". Society is "anarchic" and "nihilistic", which "depresses freedom". She rails against the "retreat of authority" and blames universities for poisoning the national debate by "promoting lethal education theories". She attacks the school system for social engineering and the welfare state for "infantilising" the poor.

Strident opinions certainly, but hardly the views of a self-confessed liberal? "Yes they are," she says. "I am liberal in the true sense. I believe that society can be improved and that it is the duty of government to improve it. I believe that society can be changed for the better. I do not believe that people should be left to rot in the mire that they are in. For me, that's conservatism."

Due to her 16-year career at The Guardian, Phillips is something of a hate-figure for many on the left, who not only despise her support for Israel but view her as "a turncoat" and "a sell-out". Her transformation to Daily Mail pundit has led some former colleagues to describe her as "beyond the pale".

Phillips is acutely aware of this and fires back: "When I was at The Guardian, they told me that I'd gone mad; that I'd gone over to the right. That was completely wrong. The whole of the Guardian world view is defensive. They define themselves by what they consider to be "the right". It's madness. They don't stand for anything: they stand for being not something. And now certainly working for the Daily Mail has allowed people to stereotype me more easily than before... but they did stereotype me before."

She adds: "Those on the left hate the Daily Mail and all it stands for because it is in tune with mainstream thinking and they are not. They hate it because it is a very powerful platform and a brilliantly edited newspaper. I haven't changed. I am still fighting for what I perceive to be truth, justice and a concern for the vulnerable."

Two years ago, at the suggestion of a friend, Phillips began an internet diary, or blog ( www.melaniephillips.com). Blogs played a key role in last year's presidential election in America, with political anoraks on the Republican side picking holes in the Democrat campaign and what they perceived to be bias by the left-leaning mainstream media. Blogging has yet to take off here to the same degree, but Phillips - who has been scouring the debris of the campaign and its coverage - turned her site into a must-read for the obsessively minded throughout the election.

On one posting, she excoriates a Church of England vicar in Chipping Sodbury for allegedly making an anti-Semitic remark about Michael Howard to Mary Ann Sieghart, the Times writer. In a typically colourful turn of phrase, she describes his comment as "the authentic voice of polite, genteel, and now utterly respectable and mainstream English Jew-hatred."

Another diary entry takes to task Simon Jenkins, the veteran columnist, for his interpretation of the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith's advice on the legality of the war in Iraq. She finishes with a flourish: "From this misreporting of what Lord Goldsmith said, Jenkins claims his position is "now untenable". On the contrary - it's not the Attorney's position which is untenable here."

Phillips, who won the Orwell Prize for journalism in 1996, says she's glad "the Iraq issue" erupted during the campaign. She argues it had become "a running sore" and needed to be debated. "In my view, Blair has always made a terrible mistake throughout by not properly confronting his critics [about Iraq] and taking them head on," she says. "He's paid a huge price for that."

She is adamant that Blair did not lie over going to war. "I realise I am in a minority, but he didn't lie," she says. Instead, she rounds on the media for what she sees as relentlessly biased coverage. "The way the Iraq war has been reported almost from the start has been utterly mendacious," she says. "I have been absolutely staggered. Almost every single development has been interpreted in the most malicious way by omission, distortion and misrepresentation."

Give me an example? "The way the evidence to the Hutton inquiry was spun by virtually all the press, every day, was to cherry-pick the evidence, to omit what was inconvenient to the story that Blair lied," she says. "I read the evidence in full and wrote a piece for The Spectator, in which I said on the basis of the evidence given to Hutton, apart from possibly the treatment of [Government weapons expert] David Kelly himself, they cannot lay a glove on Blair. Everyone said, 'This is completely mad'. Lo and behold, Hutton came to exactly that conclusion.

"Having said throughout the Hutton inquiry that Hutton, himself, was the acme of integrity and a man of intellectual rigour, overnight he became 'a dupe', 'a patsy' and his report was 'a whitewash' simply because it was not what the media wanted."

She says there's further evidence of "omission" by the media in the case of David Kay, the US weapons inspector, who resigned because he said the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was wrong. "Yes, he did say that the intelligence that there were stockpiles of WMD was wrong," agrees Phillips, "but I read what he actually said - which was unreported here. He said that what he had found was evidence that Saddam was infinitely more dangerous than the intelligence had led us to believe, because there was - or could be - a trade between the material that Saddam was accumulating in respect of the production of WMD and terror, which Saddam was in bed with." By now, Phillips is warming to her theme. "Scroll on to Lord Goldsmith's recently leaked advice, which was represented throughout the media as Goldsmith having warned that the war was illegal. But when you read his words, he actually sat on the fence."

Is she accusing fellow journalists of sloppy reporting? A pause. "One hesitates to accuse one's colleagues of laziness, because I'm also guilty of it," she says. "I think that the key to it is that the whole episode is being viewed through a prism of prejudice, of prior opinion. When you go back to the beginning of the Iraq affair, there was, in my view, a totally legitimate and passionate difference of opinion about how to contain the danger of Saddam. People who took the view that we shouldn't go to war, we should contain Saddam through the UN - although I disagreed with them profoundly - I respected them as having a very legitimate point of view.

"But when they lost the argument because the war happened, they then tried to prove retrospectively that it was wrong all along. Everything that's been a source of optimism has either been downplayed or not reported at all. And every problem has been accentuated. As a result, it has had a cumulative effect. Day after day, you have John Humphrys on the Today programme obsessively banging on about being taken to war on a lie. With no one putting alternatives strongly - Jack Straw, for example, has made a terrible fist of it; he is pathetic; I cringe when I hear him on the radio - after a while the lies have the status of truth. As a result, what started as a legitimate difference of opinion has become a rewriting of history that Saddam wasn't a threat at all."

Phillips lays much of the blame squarely at the door of the BBC, with whom she has a love-hate relationship. Oddly perhaps for someone who dislikes labels, she claims the BBC's world view is identical to that of The Guardian and The Independent, namely "soft/hard left". She says: "Corporately, if you listen to the BBC's reporting, the way subjects are selected, the way they are treated, the implicit assumptions behind the questions, the way different interviewees are questioned, the double-standards used between contributors, the BBC undoubtedly demonises America, demonises Bush, assumes the worst possible motives for them, while venerating the UN and supra-national institutions. They also articulate the moral sanctimony of the left, which holds that to be on the left is to be moral, and, therefore, to have any view that is not of the left must be of the right, and because it is of the right, it must be evil." She points to her own experience as a regular contributor to BBC television and radio.

"I have been on countless panels on which I have been completely outnumbered," she says. "They think they are the centre-ground, the sensible ground, the neutral ground, and therefore by definition, anyone saying something that doesn't fit with that perspective must be extreme. And from that you get a whole deformation of thought."

So, would she advocate the wholesale privatisation of the BBC? "I am very torn. I believe in public service broadcasting which upholds ideals such as fairness, objectivity and above all for the ability to do things which the commercial world regards as too unprofitable. If the BBC was privatised, for example, the large number of foreign correspondents would all go. I wouldn't want to lose that. But I believe the BBC has done a huge amount of damage to this country in helping shift the balance of political gravity to the left."

A constant source of dismay for Phillips is the reporting of Israel. She argues Israel has been "demonised" by the media and in particular the BBC, The Independent, The Guardian and Channel 4 News. "The state of Israel has been de-legitimised in the public mind through a relentless, obsessive and disproportionate campaign based on lies, libels, omissions, distortions and propaganda," she says. "We can see this because when people think of the flashpoints of the world which are the causes of Islamist rage towards the West, they think of Israel. Why? In large measure it's because of the sin of omission by large parts of the media and particularly the BBC, which has a unique position in commanding public trust globally."

Phillips goes on to ask why many conflicts in the developing world have been largely ignored by the corporation. She says that the genocide in the south of Sudan - which has caused the deaths of two million people during the past two decades - was "virtually never mentioned until very recently". Similarly, the flashpoints in Kashmir, the attacks on millions of Christians and "Muslims who are of a reformist nature" around the world, have been "virtually unreported". Whereas, she argues, Israel's behaviour towards the Palestinians has been "obsessively" and "disproportionately" covered.

She declares: "I speak as one who disapproves of many of the settlements. I would wish Israel to withdraw from much of the [occupied] territories. I am no hawk. I am no Likud supporter. But what I can't stand are the lies that are told. Israel's struggle for survival against Arab enemies who have never stopped saying they want to obliterate them has been misrepresented. The lies arise out of huge ignorance about the history of the conflict and that it is very difficult to report in the Palestinian territories and the Arab world.

"Few Western journalists speak Arabic and as these are not free societies, you are utterly dependent on what you are told by the authorities. Compare that with Israel, which is democratic and open. Add to that the British-left takes the view that Israel is the patsy of America, which oppresses the Third World, so that even when Palestinians are setting out to murder innocent Israelis they must somehow be the victims."

The demonising of Israel, Phillips argues, has given rise to creeping anti-Semitism in Britain. "Anti-Jewish feeling is now open at every level. You open the pages of mainstream newspapers and you find it being alleged that there is a malign conspiracy between the Jews of Washington, and the Jews of Israel to subvert the foreign policy of the most powerful nation on earth. This is a modern version of the ancient libel of the global Jewish conspiracy. It is mad. It is demented. It is irrational. I believe the demonising of Israel has provided the fig-leaf for people to feel free to articulate an ancient hatred."

Phillips was born in 1951. Her career began at the Hemel Hempstead Evening Echo, where she quickly became pigeon-holed as a writer on health and social services, which at the time - the mid-1970s - were viewed as "female subjects". From there, she moved to the now-defunct New Society, where she was reportedly viewed as "a feminist".

Phillips, who is married to Joshua Rozenberg, The Daily Telegraph legal editor, joined The Guardian in 1977 as a reporter covering the home affairs beat, before becoming social affairs correspondent and then social policy leader writer. An unhappy period as the paper's news editor followed which she describes as "not her finest hour". At the time, she believed she shared The Guardian's values of "truth and righteousness", but that notion soon faded. When The Guardian bought The Observer, she "hopped over" to the Sunday paper before quitting to join The Sunday Times as a columnist. Although she prospered there, when the job offer came up of a high-profile column at the Daily Mail she says "she was persuaded that it was in my interest to move there, as a daily paper would provide a much broader platform". She characterises the transition to the market-leading tabloid as "a big jump".

Phillips has grown tired of reading about her supposed journey across the political landscape. Betraying a rare flicker of indignation, she says: "It's completely wrong to say I've moved from left to right. I have certainly changed, in that it took me a long time to realise that people who purported to be "liberal" and on the side of the vulnerable and dispossessed weren't - in fact, they were intent on keeping them in that position. That was the change I made, and it made me an enemy of the left, no doubt about it. But it does not make me 'of the right'."

She adds scornfully: "The left will go to their graves saying I am an extreme right-winger because the more I insist upon things like truth and morality, the more extreme in their view I become. I'm afraid that says much more about them than it does about me."

Melanie Phillips blog can be found at www.melaniephillips.com; BBC Radio 4's 'The Moral Maze' returns on 4 June

From Left to Right

As a young journalist on the left-leaning periodical New Society, Phillips was thought of as "radical" and a "feminist" and was fascinated by social injustices ­ but she already showed tell-tale signs of going against the consensus of the left:

FROM "BRIXTON AND CRIME" (NEW SOCIETY, JULY 1976)

"Social workers depict an almost Dickensian scene of skilled young pickpockets at work - and they say they make no distinction between black and white for their victims. No one can provide a reason for this increase in thefts, but it does seem to be done not just out of economic necessity - undoubtedly significant - but as a philosophy of life. 'Thievin' means survival,' one truculent black told me.... Alienation of young blacks cannot be blamed entirely on white society - though this plays a large part - because some of it seems to stem from their own family background."

FROM "A PAUPER'S GRAVE" (NEW SOCIETY MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 1976)

"Even today working class communities will club together rather than see a pauper's funeral. Members of the luncheon club for the elderly at Toynbee Hall in Stepney told me that door-to-door collections were still common.... 'A friend of mine had to have a pauper's funeral,unfortunately,' said one woman. 'Well, I had to do something. I mean, there's not even any proper lining... it's just raw cotton balls with the seeds still in! So some of us got together and paid for a proper lining and flowers as well."

FROM "ACCOUNTABLE SOCIAL WORK," (NEW SOCIETY APRIL 1976)

"In the main, social services departments appear to be insulated against legal action by their wide discretionary powers and the reluctance of courts to interfere. Nevertheless, it is interesting to compare Britain with America where determined welfare rights workers broke through similar protective barriers by simply using the law. If present trends continue, perhaps our social services will move away from the area of charitable discretion to become enforceable rights."

A journalistic journey that has taken her to the Guardian, the Observer, the Sunday Times and, since 2001, the Daily Mail, has seen her views become increasingly forthright:

"Activists have sedulously promoted the impression that gay couples are just like heterosexuals in wanting to settle down in monogamous unions and knit bedsocks by a cosy fireside."

DAILY MAIL 2003

"Those of us who have consistently argued that multiculturalism would instead dissolve social bonds, set minorities against each other and, above all, rob the indigenous British of their right to their own culture and identity, have been mocked and vilified as bigots."

DAILY MAIL 2004

"The enormous rise in immigration since he took office is simply changing the face of the country -- as yesterday's report by Migration Watch makes plain -- and putting key public services under intolerable strain."

DAILY MAIL 2005