Guardian Angel

by Melanie Phillips

  I came from the kind of family in which it was simply unthinkable for anyone to have voted Conservative. Voting anything other than Labour would have been seen as a class betrayal. For my parents, it was very simple. The Conservative party represented the boss class, while Labour represented the little man — people like us. Until 1977, my father read the down-market Daily Express. Actually, he read only the sports pages at the back; the rest of it, he said, was ‘rubbish’. When I joined the Guardian, however, he started to buy that – and to my astonishment became a most enthusiastic fan. Not only did he exult in the luminous nature of its sports reporting, but he delighted in the quality of writing throughout the paper. Touched by his loyalty, I observed in wonderment how he now devoured its news and opinion pages and would hold forth with animation on its reports and political views. I felt almost as if he had somehow got to university after all. And so my bond with the paper which was now bringing such benefit not just to me, who had everything, but to my father, who had nothing, was cemented still further.

  CHAPTER 3: Little Miss Guardianista: The Darling of the Left

  In the late 1970s and early 1980s, at the end of James Callaghan’s Labour government and the very beginning of Margaret Thatcher’s period in power, I generally toed the standard leftist line.

  That agenda was a set of dogmatic mantras. Poverty was bad, cuts in public spending were bad, prison was bad, the Tory government was bad, the state was good, poor people were good, minorities were good, sexual freedom was good. During this period, British society underwent the equivalent of a cultural revolution. People talk of the ‘swinging sixties’ as the decade when the West was swept along by the sexual revolution and insurrectionary student agitation. But it was during the seventies and eighties when those ideas actually became embedded in British society, when the students and young agitators of the sixties became lawyers, teachers, university lecturers, civil servants, campaigners, think tankers, and politicians — and thus captured the citadels of British culture, where they proceeded to undermine core values of education, family, law, and other cultural building blocks of society.

  Yet of all this revolutionary ferment there was little sign in my own writing during those early years at the Guardian. There was virtually no questioning of the iron assumption that the poor and socially disadvantaged were inevitably the victims of circumstances rather than accountable for their own behaviour, or that the state was a wholly benign actor in the lives of individuals, or that the clean-up TV campaigner Mary Whitehouse was utterly ‘out-to-lunch’. How could there have been? It never occurred to me that there could seriously be another way of looking at the world. If I had doubts, it must mean there was something wrong with me. My colleagues all thought in a similar way; so did my friends and family.

  And we all knew one thing above all else – that we were on the side of the angels, and across the barricades hatchet-faced right-wingers represented the dark forces of human nature and society that we were all so proud to be against. With what grim joy we watched the blue-rinse brigade at the annual Conservative party conference baying for the return of corporal punishment and the death penalty. Yes, we shuddered to each other, yes there it was, the proof that the Conservatives really were a breed apart. Of course we were different; we were of superior morality and intellect. We needed the Conservatives to be stupid and cruel. We defined ourselves by what we were not.

  Despite my tribal liberal-leftism, there were nevertheless, early on, some tiny signs of dangerously independent thought. On one occasion, while writing for New Society, I displayed some disdain for the free pass minorities were afforded by victim culture. After talking to residents of Brixton in 1976 about the local crime rate, I wrote, ‘Delinquency among young West Indians is causing concern… [This] alienation cannot be blamed entirely on white society. Some of it seems to stem from their own family background.’

  In 1978, I wrote an unsigned leading article for New Society in the wake of yet another scandal at a psychiatric hospital. I argued that this provided ammunition for those who wanted to bulldoze the mental-handicap hospitals and house their inmates in the community instead, an idea I described as ‘pie in the sky’. I wrote: ‘There will always be people whose handicaps are so severe they need to be in hospital.’ Such places should not be grim fortresses, I accepted, but any chance of improving them was being destroyed by the ‘strident, fashionable and unrealistic campaign for community care’ (New Society, 30 November 1978).

  This piece provoked some outrage. It was the first time I had come up against the defining stance of the left — that only one view was to be permitted, with no deviations. I was startled, but what had prompted me into challenging this shibboleth was that, as a cub reporter in Hemel Hempstead, I had written about a number of these institutions, of which there happened to be several in the area. I had seen for myself that, along with their potential for abuse, they filled a role that simply could not be replicated in the wider community. But now, for the first time, I saw how the pursuit by the left of an abstract ideal risked abandoning the vulnerable — and that the left just didn’t care. The abstract ideal — that all such patients should live ‘normally’ just like other people — was simply so important that evidence and experience counted for nothing. But I was not driven by ideology. I simply went where the evidence led me. And in time, this would lead me into head-on confrontation with the left, who had replaced truth with ideology, and whose weapon of choice against all dissent was vilification and demonisation.

  As the Guardian’s social services correspondent, I raised eyebrows by taking a critical attitude towards the social work profession. Most specialist reporters avoid antagonising the people about whom they write because it is from them that such journalists get stories. If you put their backs up, those sources will dry up. Journalists thus become complicit in what can amount to a conspiracy by professional elites against ordinary people. I refused to do that. I always saw my role as telling truth to power, and from my earliest time in journalism I concluded that professional, academic elites had to be robustly interrogated in order to serve the interests of the public. This was an approach which, a few years down the line, was to bring me into serious conflict with both colleagues and the wider middle-class establishment — just as going where the evidence led me would similarly cause me endless trouble.

  And below the radar my own views were subtly beginning to shift. Margaret Thatcher had come to power in 1979, and although at the Guardian it was an unchallengeable given that she was a heartless, narrow-minded, suburban nightmare, I was listening, despite myself, to a point of view I had not heard before.

  These Thatcherites were not the usual Conservative upper-class squires; ironically, those toffs tended to be the ‘wets’, or more liberal Tories. The Thatcherites mainly came from the lower or middle-middle class. They were people whose backgrounds were similar to my own. They were promoting the values with which I had been brought up — Labour-supporting family that mine was — all about opportunities for social betterment, hard work, taking responsibility for oneself. And since I never was a Marxist true believer, more a mere cultural lefty for whom a dialectic was possibly something to do with a telephone or else a remedy for kidney disease, I looked at the Thatcher government and wondered whether what I was hearing was at the very least a case that in all fairness required an answer.

  I had never previously challenged the assumption that the primary duty of the state was to alleviate poverty. My father’s still-shuddering memories of not having had enough to eat as a child, and his fierce hatred of those who he thought now intended to ‘bring back the workhouse’, cut very deep. But the early certainties of my New Society days were being challenged by trudging round the houses of the poor on godforsaken estates and seeing something way beyond physical need.

  What I saw was a spiritual poverty which could not be explained away by material deprivation. Some people – the old, for example – were truly very poor, unable to heat their houses as well as f
eed themselves. But in other houses I encountered squalor, filth, gross neglect — but also video recorders, freezers, expensive bikes for the kids. This started to gnaw away at me. How could such people be poor if they had these things? Moreover, a number of them were clearly on the fiddle or could have obtained a job for low pay. It seemed to me that some of the poor were indeed ‘deserving’, and some were not. But that went straight back to the Poor Law, Dickens, the workhouse! How could I possibly think such a heartless thing?

  I sought answers. I sat in seminars of grindingly earnest tedium listening to arguments about ‘relative poverty’, which apparently meant that even if people had fridge-freezers and video-recorders, they were still poor as long as they didn’t have all the things everyone else had. This worried me even more; since the consumer society meant people were getting more and more stuff all the time, this surely meant that poverty was institutionalised as a permanent feature of society from which there was never to be any escape.

  As I pondered all this, I kept such heretical thoughts to myself. Instinctively, I knew that there could be no discussion about them that would not immediately bring down accusations of treachery upon my head. A few years later, I mentioned such thinking to one of my mentors. I felt safe enough with him to raise the dilemma I perceived — that income equality was intrinsically unattainable and a recipe for permanently institutionalised poverty. ‘Well, that’s no reason not to try to achieve it’, he snapped, and stalked off.

  I felt as if I had been slapped in the face. He was such a thoughtful person, independent-minded, intellectually curious – or so I had always thought. Why then had he behaved as if I was a person he would find it offensive even to talk to, all because I had asked a question?

  To try to expunge the feeling that I had been somehow branded, I expressed to another colleague the tentative view that poor people had once seemed to possess more self-reliance and ability to cope with disadvantage than was now apparent, with all the relative beneficence of the welfare state.

  ‘Ah’, he drawled, ‘but then you had the Torah’.

  If I fondly imagined that I was just one of the Guardian gang the same as everyone else, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  I had never thought of myself as a ‘Jewish writer’, and at that stage, with a brief to cover British social issues, I hardly ever wrote about specifically Jewish topics. In fact, the Jewish values I had absorbed from my family background informed everything I thought. There was my fundamental commitment to ‘heal the world’, which is a defining Jewish ethic; there was also my no less fundamental attachment to reason, truth, and logical argument, all of which have deep roots in the Hebrew Bible and in Talmudic exegesis.

  Indeed, maybe I would never have been the contrarian I became had I not belonged to a people considered the most argumentative in the world. What I failed to realise at the time, however, was that these characteristics were increasingly setting me apart from those who were going along with the great secular onslaught on the Judeo-Christian roots of the West. While I may not have thought twice about the fact that I was a Jew, they were looking at me through very different eyes.

  CHAPTER 4: A Defining Moment: The Iron Enters My Soul

  All this was by way of a sideshow compared to what was about to take place while I was a leader-writer for the paper.

  I became one of the team writing the paper’s editorials, or leaders, at the end of 1980. Fortune seemed to be smiling on me. I had just won a national press award for my reporting, specifically for revealing that immigrant Asian women were being given virginity tests at Heathrow airport in an attempt to discover whether they were breaching immigration rules about their married status. The policy ended on the day my story led the front page.

  The timing of my award could not have been more auspicious. Early in 1980, when I realised I was pregnant, I decided I wanted to work part-time, at least while the baby was very small. When I plucked up courage to ask for this concession, Peter Preston, who was fearful of setting a precedent for his female staff, broke the news of my award to me and observed with a rueful smile that I had him cornered. He suggested I join the leader-writing team part-time and I jumped at the chance.

  When my son Gabriel was born, I took four months’ leave. This was a traumatic period. Motherhood hit me like a wrecking ball. I felt trapped and wretched — and deeply ashamed, because I considered this to be an unforgivable response to the great gift of a healthy, beautiful baby. So I told no-one and sought no help. My mother was on the scene every day, ‘just popping in’ during her lunch hour at the nearby office where she now worked. I longed for her to arrive — but as soon as she did, far from feeling relief, I was unaccountably angry and longed for her to go. What was wrong with me? Now, in retrospect, it is all too obvious. Inadequately mothered because I had never been allowed to be a child, I found being a mother myself extremely difficult. And now, far from making everything better as she once had done, my mother’s very presence – which inevitably required me yet again to ‘mother her’ – could only provoke an incoherent anger and further depression.

  I pushed all this to the back of my mind. I also pushed aside the fact that she seemed to be finding it more and more exhausting to walk.

  In due course, the cavalry arrived in the form of Frances, a children’s nanny of great competence who was to work for us for some five years. I returned to work part-time, embarking on the daily maternal guilt-trip and juggling the irreconcilable pressures of work and children which even a splendid nanny could not alleviate.

  At work, at least, I was happy. The leader team represented the Guardian at its most collegiate. As a group, its members resembled not so much a newsroom as a university seminar. The leaders were generally thoughtful, balanced, and scholarly. I wrote the ones about social policy and I loved writing them. It was all so... well, civilised. Preston allowed his leader-writers a long leash. You might say he could afford to do so, since, as these writers were hand-picked, he knew where they were coming from.

  He himself, however, was no ideologue. On several occasions, he approved the argument I was making in a leader even though it was clear he didn’t altogether agree with it. This was striking, since the leader column was supposedly his voice in the paper. On a number of issues, however, I came to the conclusion that he didn’t really mind one way or the other as long as an intelligent argument was made – within the broad parameters of liberal or left-wing thinking, of course.

  One of the more remarkable aspects of that leader room was the presence of Richard Gott, at various times the paper’s foreign editor and features editor. Gott was not just any old lefty. When I worked at the Guardian he would come out with the most preposterous positions, such as his attempts to exonerate Pol Pot of his crimes against humanity.

  Gott was afforded unlimited indulgence by Preston. The reason was said to be that theirs was a friendship which went back a very long way and Preston was loyal to his friends. But it was also, surely, that Gott was a man of immense charm, old-world courtesy, and erudition. He was clever and well-educated. He exuded the effortless superiority of Balliol College, Oxford; more pertinently, perhaps, he had a quality of lethal frivolity which stamped him as essentially an upper-class gadfly. It seemed to me that Preston was drawn to such types precisely because his own character was so different. Gauche, awkward, and shy, and trapped within a body permanently disabled and often plagued by pain from childhood polio, he tended to display a degree of sycophancy towards those who glittered with poise, confidence, and social clout.

  Whatever the reason, Gott was indulged as if he were no more dubious than some kind of eccentric uncle. He would come out with support for one tyrannical left-wing figure or another and people would smile and roll their eyes in mock outrage. It was treated as a big joke. I was increasingly appalled – but I noted how even those who were similarly shocked (and there were more than a few) knew they had to keep their heads down. Gott was simply untouchable.

  When many years later Got
t was eventually outed as a KGB ‘agent of influence’, Preston was devastated, talking about a deep betrayal of trust. But the fact was that Gott had made no secret of his opinions – and Preston had never displayed the slightest concern about such views, let alone removed him from the senior positions he held at the very heart of the paper. Indeed, others held similarly hard-left views, such as the chillingly Stalinist Jonathan Steele – who also served as foreign editor and a leader-writer — and, in later years, Seumas Milne. Although regarded with deep disapproval as a ‘tankie’ — one who had supposedly supported the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia — Milne ran the Guardian’s op-ed pages for many years, offering a platform to apologists for terrorism, tyranny, and a denial of the very human rights to which the Guardian so ferociously nailed its flag.

  That was possible because the liberal left on the paper indulgently disavowed the hard left as essentially harmless ideological fossils. The hard left was deemed to have little continuity with nice, decent liberal lefties. But of course the double standard was egregious. While any expression of odious far-right views provoked instantaneous hysteria, denunciations, and general indignation, odious hard-left views provoked at most a few clicks of the tongue and world-weary disdain.

  Moreover, while there were undoubtedly serious differences, the distinction between tankie totalitarians and the soft left served to mask the fact that the soft left was also totalitarian in its instincts. It may have recoiled from the tanks rolling into Hungary or Czechoslovakia, but it most certainly parked its own tanks on the lawns of British society. From there it proceeded to lay siege to the fortresses of Western culture, crushing all dissent beneath its tracks.