Guardian Angel

by Melanie Phillips

  As for my political colleagues, much of their ire surely derived from the fact that I was not a member of the Lobby, the group of political journalists with passes to the lobby of the House of Commons, and which operates as a closed circle bound by common rules of reporting. In my view, the Lobby acts as a secretive and unaccountable conduit for politicians, with the quid pro quo that the journalists will not rock the boat. Indeed, if they did so their source of stories would dry up – a fact brought home to me when a Labour minister was complaining about the ‘ingratitude’ of a certain political correspondent at the Guardian who had written disobligingly about the Labour government, despite the fact that this minister had personally fed him stories for use every Monday when news was thin on the ground.

  But the explosive reaction to my article was clearly not entirely due to such professional territorialism. Mandelson’s reaction was key. Even at that very early stage, it later seemed to me, Blair had been singled out as a future party leader – and without the secret briefings of the parliamentary Lobby to constrain me, I had unwittingly pointed to the fledgling emperor who was destined to be crowned and had wondered aloud whether he had any clothes.

  Having provoked such a reaction, I did not expect to be allowed into the Blair Presence ever again. Nevertheless, I did meet up with him on a few occasions both when he was Leader of the Opposition and early in his period as Prime Minister. After he became party leader in 1994, he invited me to see him in his rooms at Westminster. By this time, I had already been engaged for several years in hand-to-hand combat with the left over the issue of the family. Blair’s words therefore astonished me. ‘I think there’s a hole at the heart of the Labour party’, he said, ‘and it’s called the family. I want you to help me fill it.’

  So I sat and talked to him about the crucial significance of marriage, the relative catastrophe of broken families for both individuals and society, the terrible mistake of providing incentives to young girls to have babies without their father on board. He got out a pad and wrote it all down. I realised from this conversation that he shared many, if not all, of my views on this – but that he knew he would have the devil’s own job in getting such a traditional family agenda past his colleagues. For the first time, I saw him as essentially a lonely figure, pitting himself against his party. My estimation of him went up.

  Subsequently, as my situation at Guardian Newspapers deteriorated, I was emboldened to mention my predicament to him. Once again, his reaction astonished me. He told me he saw me as an outrider for many of the ideas he supported but did not dare voice himself because of the inevitable hostility of the left. He thought therefore that I might be even more effective outside the relatively small and entirely closed thought-circle of the Guardian, presenting these ideas in a reasonable and nonpartisan fashion to those with minds that were still open, and thus preparing the ground for his own policies to be received with more equanimity.

  This conversation left me feeling uncomfortable. I was taken aback to discover I might be used in such a way, even passively. I didn’t want to be the outrider of anyone. I believed that journalists had to be totally independent of all vested interests and in the pocket of nobody at all, not even by default. I was sorry I had even mentioned my position to him.

  I needn’t have worried. The scales fell from my eyes at virtually the moment Blair was sealing his destiny as Prime Minister. During the 1997 general election campaign, I heard on the radio the senior Labour politician Jack Straw state authoritatively that the Labour government was committed to the rights of those pursuing alternative family lifestyles. In that instant, I knew that whatever Blair might privately think, there was no chance whatsoever that his government would shore up the traditional family; on the contrary, Straw had effectively announced that it would now accelerate the task of destroying it.

  I was right. After Blair won the 1997 election, war was waged within the Labour government over family policy. On one side was Blair; on the other was virtually his entire Cabinet. The Prime Minister lost. As for me, I regarded the Labour government from the get-go as a threat to the values of Britain and Western society in general. From family breakdown to multiculturalism, education to welfare reform, human rights to the EU, I viewed the Blair government either as pursuing a radical agenda to undermine British national identity and normative social and moral values, or selling the pass over its ostensible but meaningless commitment to shoring them up.

  With the exception of one occasion when Blair was in difficulties over his policy on the National Health Service, and, in desperation, called in myself and others considered to be part of the ‘awkward squad’ to tell him what we thought was going wrong, he never spoke to me again. Whether he personally came to think that my political position had become too ‘right-wing’ or whether I had merely become too toxic on the left for him safely to be seen to associate with me, I do not know.

  CHAPTER 13: I Finally Leave Guardian Newspapers

  In 1995, Peter Preston resigned as editor of the Guardian. I promptly threw my hat into the ring as his successor. In view of all that had happened to me at the paper, how could I possibly have done that? In view of all that had happened to me at the paper, how could I possibly not have done so?

  In the event, as was widely predicted, Alan Rusbridger became editor of the Guardian.

  On a couple of occasions during this period, the cultural establishment did nod in my direction; but in both instances, it was scarcely an unambiguous gesture. In March 1996, to the amazement of all, not least myself, I won the prestigious Orwell Prize for political writing. The prize had been established two years previously by the left-wing political thinker Bernard Crick. Months later, I ran into Professor Crick. ‘I was away when the prize was decided’, he told me coldly, ‘but if I had been there at the time, I can assure you it would not have been awarded to you.’

  At around the same time, I was approached by a production company to make a TV documentary about the family, an idea which was being pitched to the BBC. The producer was highly enthusiastic and excited about the project. ‘We think you are so reactionary that you are in the very vanguard of the new thinking!’ he exclaimed. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  ‘Who Killed the Family?’ was duly made and screened on BBC2, to general indifference. In subsequent years, several other producers came to me with ideas for TV documentaries for me to present. I told them I thought commissioning editors would not accept a proposal that featured me. ‘What nonsense’, said these young men, ‘you are so box office!’ One by one they came back chastened. ‘Can’t understand it’, they muttered. But one of them said a BBC bigwig had told him he had been underwhelmed by the family film. What a surprise.

  The uneasy calm resulting from my move to the Observer did not last long. The Sunday title was haemorrhaging money and the Guardian was complaining. After about a year, Jonathan Fenby was replaced by Andrew Jaspan, from the Scotsman; after another year, with the paper’s fortunes still not improving, Jaspan was replaced by Will Hutton, from the Guardian and the BBC.

  Hutton was an economics writer with an engaging Tiggerish disposition which charmed most who encountered him. Under his editorship, the Guardianisation of the Observer’s culture was swiftly completed. Its previous tone of tolerant liberalism finally gave way to the malign political correctness of the Guardian. After Labour won the 1997 general election, Hutton’s front page -- of which he appeared to be inordinately proud -- carried the enormous headline: ‘Goodbye xenophobia’.

  As soon as I saw that headline, a chill ran through me. For it was a declaration of war upon dissent, a sign that under Hutton any deviation from leftist orthodoxy would be demonised. And exactly what was the viewpoint which was being vilified here as ‘xenophobia’? Why, the belief by the Conservative party that Britain should remain outside the euro and resist the tide of further EU integration and loss of national sovereignty —a view that sought to defend democratic self-government against erosion and extinction by bureau
cratic corporatism. My view.

  Given the catastrophic blow that the euro has now dealt to the economies of EU member states, people in Britain have been congratulating themselves on having had the foresight not to have joined the European currency – the position that was damned by Hutton’s Observer some fifteen years previously as ‘xenophobia’.

  My premonition at that time that my position would become untenable was to be borne out by subsequent events. As a commentator on the principal issues of the day, my column had always been showcased in its obvious place on the op-ed pages. Now, however, Hutton dispatched me to the back of the paper — not in the main news section, but thrown in with articles which were not only essentially frivolous but often crude and vulgar. It was a powerful statement that was painfully obvious to all. I had been marginalised and my nose was being rubbed in it.

  In his jolly, back-slapping way, Hutton repeatedly joshed me about the differences between us. It was presumably all supposed to be good clean fun, but behind the forced bonhomie I sensed defensiveness and anger. Indeed, on one occasion that anger spilled into the open when I wrote a piece about the EU — only to find Hutton furiously accusing me of having not only deliberately contradicted his own position, but of having referred to academic sources of which he had made clear he disapproved.

  His outrage was as ridiculous as it was off-limits. The idea that I had expressed such a view in order to spite him was offensive and absurd, and for an editor to object to the sources upon whom a writer was drawing was positively chilling. So much for a ‘liberal’ editor.

  As the paper became more and more uniform in its hard-edged views, I found myself increasingly in an all-too-familiar position. At the leader conferences that I attended I was usually out on a limb, with the rest of the room apparently united in incredulity at the views I was expressing.

  And during this time I badly needed some public support, for the campaign against me in the education world had taken a particularly vicious turn. Some years previously, I had discovered one solitary but important ally in the battle over education standards. This was the Chief Inspector of Schools, Chris Woodhead, who had gone to war against what he described as failed teaching methods — and who had earned the undying enmity of the entire education establishment as a result.

  To me, his eruption onto the education battlefield was like the arrival of the cavalry. In piece after piece, I endorsed his views and supported him against attack. As a result, I found myself regularly sniped at in the education press and certain gossip columns that suggested there was something fishy about the uncanny similarity between Woodhead’s views and my own. But this congruence of views was only striking because we both happened to believe that the entire education establishment had taken a desperately wrong turn — and the absence of other voices in support merely proved the point.

  I suspected that some of this sniping was being fed by those around the then Education Secretary David Blunkett, who seemed to feel personally undermined by Woodhead, and who had himself written bitterly — and falsely — about an apparent conspiracy between myself and the Chief Inspector of Schools. The unpleasant innuendo behind the sniping reached its nadir in 1996. In an article in the Times Educational Supplement, which juxtaposed pictures of myself and Woodhead as if we were Siamese twins and claimed we offered similar visions of despair, Paul Francis wrote:

  ‘I didn’t believe it at first. There was the usual staffroom gossip, but I always try to ignore that. I noticed the graffiti by the bike sheds – “Mel 4 Chris” – but thought nothing of it. Then I saw it with my own eyes: they were there last Thursday, sitting together for our cameras. Journalist Melanie Phillips and Chief Inspector Chris Woodhead are definitely an item.

  ‘Nothing romantic, you understand. This isn’t a tabloid slur effected through sexist insinuation. No, the link with Chris and Melanie is intellectual, but it’s powerful and dangerous all the same. They’re united by a common emotion – exasperation. Out there are these bloody schools with bloody kids and bloody teachers, and they won’t do what we want. Except it isn’t “we”. It’s “I”, and what passionately united Mel and Chris is their feeling of uniqueness, their sense that they have been chosen, separately but simultaneously, to say what’s wrong with English education and to put it right’ (TES, 27 September 1996).

  Eventually, the war of attrition under Hutton wore me down until I finally conceded defeat. There were rumours that he would soon depart — but I was finally forced to acknowledge what I should have admitted a decade earlier: that I just did not fit any longer at Farringdon Road. When the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times approached me and offered me a slot as an op-ed columnist, at long last I gave in my notice. ‘I suppose there’s nothing I can say which would change your mind?’ Hutton said. I would have laughed out loud at such shamelessly transparent falseness if I had not been near to tears.

  And so, after twenty-one years, I finally left Guardian Newspapers and became a columnist on the Sunday Times. Soon afterwards, I ran into one of my old mentors at the Guardian. ‘I would never work for Murdoch’, he spat in contempt, and stalked off. I was no longer even to be talked to. After almost two decades of being under this man’s wing at the Guardian, I was now erased from civil society. Such are the principles on the left, the sole repository of unbesmirchable virtue, from which delusional promontory of self-regard are hurled thunderbolts of disdain at those who offend against its shibboleths. While writing this memoir, I heard that a former colleague was still smarting – after all these years – from earnest advice I had apparently given him back in the nineties not to work for a Murdoch paper. Did I really hold such views then? Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. For sure, the past is a different country for me now.

  CHAPTER 14: A Voyage Away From My Father

  With my departure from Farringdon Road, I was not just leaving the Guardian. I was also leaving my father behind. Having led him, a wondering neophyte, onto the cultural uplands, I was now declaring them to be contaminated soil. Like my mother, he was simply bewildered. He just couldn’t understand how I could have broken with the side that, in his unshakeable view, stood up for the little man. That must mean I was now lining up with the boss class that stamped upon people like him. Not that he said so in so many words. Paralysed by a combination of love, loyalty, and inarticulacy, he simply couldn’t have done so. If only he had been able to have it out with me as an equal! I might have been irritated, resentful, furious even – but at least I would not have felt as if I was abandoning him in an act of familial treachery. As it was, his crestfallen puzzlement pierced me every time I saw him.

  But what indeed had I now become? Was I now a conservative? Was I right-wing?

  Everyone seemed to think so. I was now invited to meetings at conservative think tanks and even as a speaker on their platforms. Much that such people said resonated with me. They seemed to be refreshingly rooted in the real world rather than frolicking in the neverlands of theory and wishful thinking; they looked soberly at facts and evidence and had an open mind; in disagreement they were courteous and did not resort to abuse.

  Yet for all that, I felt they were just not my tribe. Stubbornly I insisted: ‘I am not a conservative.’ Some agreed I was not; they told me I was an old-fashioned, authentic liberal. Others said, when they had finished laughing, that of course I was a conservative; in what way, after all, did I differ?

  But differ I did, because I was still a radical. I still believed that society could and should be repaired, that abuses of power should be fought and the vulnerable protected. There were still dragons to slay; the only difference was that the dragons had turned out to be the very people who I had once thought were riding alongside me beneath the banners of decency, truth, and justice.

  And there were profound differences of outlook with my new conservative allies. I was certainly not a free-market devotee. On the contrary, I believed that the obsession with market forces was philistine and destructive. It reduced everything to economics and thus
corroded institutions and values — amongst them some of the most important bonds of trust making up the social fabric — that conservatives should have been defending.

  My perspective seemed not to fit conventional thinking on either left or right, because the values that drove me were not political or economic but moral.

  My beef was with a society consumed by individualism — and that applied to both left and right. On the left it took the form of libertarian social policies, destruction of all external authority, replacement of the particular by the universal, of the nation state by transnational progressivism, human rights, and victim culture. But I also saw individualism at work on the right expressed through worship of the free market, deemed to be the panacea for all ills.

  This was my beef against Mrs Thatcher – a position from which I have not departed to this day. Mrs T did some excellent things, the most important of which was her heroic attempt to arrest and reverse Britain’s morbid acceptance of its own decline. But there was a hole at the heart of Thatcherism. Its eponymous heroine was no respecter of tradition. She was also a radical – but one who believed that anything other than the free market was a conspiracy against human freedom.

  I felt strongly that cultures could not be reduced to a balance sheet. It was simply inappropriate to imagine that British institutions should all be run like Marks and Spencer. Mrs Thatcher regarded the market-insulated professions as a conspiracy against the consumer. She was against inherited convention, and for competition. She did not acknowledge that intangibles such as trust and disinterestedness were not only priceless, but rested very often on just such inherited conventions.

  I believed that, far from saving Britain, the Thatcherites’ utilitarian reductionism had helped erode still further the basis for moral authority and cultural tradition. This contributed in turn to the decay in integrity and competence of British public life under Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative successor, John Major, in whose administration, I wrote, ‘official deceit, dissembling, and disinformation are now so routine they barely merit comment’; while political life was run by ‘placemen and cronies’ (Guardian, 16 January 1993).