Melanie Phillips - Career

Career

Phillips trained as a journalist on the Evening Echo, a local newspaper in Hemel Hempstead, as her probationary period in the provinces, then compulsory for the profession. After winning the Young Journalist of the Year award in 1976, she spent a short period at the New Society magazine, before joining The Guardian newspaper in 1977 and becoming its social services correspondent and social policy leader writer.

She was named in 1984 the paper's news editor, and was reported to have fainted on her first day. She started her own opinion column in 1987. As a writer for The Guardian in 1982 she defended the Labour Party at the time of the split with the Social Democratic Party. While working for The Guardian, Phillips wrote a play called "Traitors" which 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.

Phillips left The Guardian in 1993, saying that her relationship with the paper and its readers had become "like a really horrific family argument". She took her opinion column to the Guardian's sister-paper The Observer, then to the Sunday Times in 1998, before writing regularly for the Daily Mail in 2001. She also writes for the Jewish Chronicle and other periodicals. Since 2003, she has written a blog, once hosted by The Spectator, but now at her own website.