Guardian Angel

by Melanie Phillips

  Table Of Contents

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER 1: A Perfect Family Storm: The Shaping of a Culture Warrior

  CHAPTER 2: The Guardian of Eden: I Arrive in Paradise

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

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

  CHAPTER 5: Traitors: How the Baton Was Snapped

  CHAPTER 6: Stumbling Into the Culture Wars

  CHAPTER 7: Onwards Into the Fire

  CHAPTER 8: Journalism in Transition

  CHAPTER 9: End Times at the Guardian

  CHAPTER 10: The Worst Witch in the Hunt

  CHAPTER 11: All Must Have Prizes

  CHAPTER 12: The Battle For Britain’s Soul

  CHAPTER 13: I Finally Leave Guardian Newspapers

  CHAPTER 14: A Voyage Away From My Father

  CHAPTER 15: From Culture War to the War of Civilisation

  CHAPTER 16: Separated at Last

  CHAPTER 17: A Very Strange Obsession

  End Matter

  PREFACE

  When Margaret Thatcher died in April 2013, homage was paid across to the world to a political titan who had turned around Britain’s basket-case economy, arrested its sense of its own inevitable decline and helped destroy Soviet communism.

  In Britain, however, alongside the tributes to this great statesman, her death provoked an almost psychopathic eruption of vicious hatred on the left. Elementary decency towards the newly deceased was swept aside as young people who hadn’t even been alive when Mrs Thatcher was Britain’s Prime Minister held gloating ‘death parties’, danced in the streets under banners declaring ‘Rejoice, Thatcher is dead’ and launched a Facebook campaign to try to propel Judy Garland’s song "Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead" to the top of the music charts.

  Among the general public, a number of whom lined the route of Lady Thatcher’s funeral procession to applaud her coffin, this vile reaction produced revulsion and amazement. For myself, however, I was not surprised. As I knew from my own career charting social and political trends for more than thirty years, there were now two Britains: the first adhering to decency, rationality and duty to others, and the second characterised by hatred, rampant selfishness, and a terrifying repudiation of reason.

  I have long been associated with fighting these 'culture wars' in the defence of Western values against their attackers. This memoir, however, is the story of my culture war: the account of my battles with the hate-mongering left.

  It is an account of the tumultuous roller-coaster of a journey I have been on both in my personal life and my professional career as a journalist. For that is a career in which, having started out in the very belly of the left-wing beast, I have been obsessively denounced for subsequently having abandoned the moral high ground of progressive politics and become instead 'right-wing'.

  This accusation is in fact meaningless, since the left merely deploys the term ‘right-wing’ as a crude insult against anyone who dares challenge its shibboleths. It uses this taunt to shut down debate by bullying its targets and labelling them as extremists, bigots, or other enemies of humanity in order to frighten people away from listening to them.

  In fact, I have never been fighting these battles from 'the right'. Instead, I have taken the fight to the left from its very own purported moral high ground, which I once believed we all shared but which I came to realise it had most cynically traduced.

  I always believed in the duty of a journalist to uphold truth over lies, follow the evidence where it led and fight abuses of power wherever they were to be found. I gradually realised, however, that the left was not on the side of truth, reason, and justice, but instead promoted ideology, malice, and oppression. Rather than fighting the abuse of power, it embodied it.

  Through demonising its enemies in this way, the left has undermined the possibility of finding common ground and all but destroyed rational discourse. This is because, as shown by its reaction to Lady Thatcher’s death, it substitutes insult and abuse for argument and reasoned disagreement.

  More devastatingly still, by twisting the meaning of words such as liberal, compassion, justice and many others into their opposites, it has hijacked the centre-ground of politics. Left-wing ideology is now falsely said to constitute the moderate centre-ground, while the true centre-ground is now vilified as ‘the right'.

  This is as mind-bending as it is destructive, for it has introduced a fatal confusion into political debate on both sides of the Atlantic. Redefining the true middle ground of politics as ‘right-wing’ has served to besmirch and toxify the commitment to truth, reason, decency, and reality which characterises where most people happen to situate their thinking. At the same time, by loudly asserting that left-wing ideology is really ‘centrist’, the left has succeeded in presenting extremist, antisocial, or even nihilistic ideas as unarguably good, and all dissent is promptly vilified as ‘extreme’.

  The result has been a retreat from reason and a polarisation of political debate, with each side circling its wagons and striking ever more inflexible, dogmatic, and adversarial positions. What I have been trying to do is to break out of those absurd caricatures to reconnect politics to the world of reality. Despite the epithets hurled my way, I am not ‘right-wing’; how can I be, when I am driven by the desire to make a better world, stand up for right over wrong, and look after the most vulnerable in society?

  It is perfectly possible to combine, as I do, an idealistic belief in healing society, fighting oppression, and looking after the vulnerable – ideals associated with the left – with a more hard-headed commitment to making moral judgments between good and bad behaviour, distinguishing between truth and lies, and focusing on what is achievable rather than what is desirable only in theory – attributes associated with ‘the right’.

  It is surely in this kind of combination that the true ‘centre ground’ resides. It is therefore imperative to rescue the language from its left-wing hijackers and restore truth, reason and decency to political debate. Unfortunately, conservatives on both sides of the pond have themselves become intimidated, cowed, and demoralised by the left’s mind-bending discourse. This memoir is an attempt to set the record straight, and thereby show how the true centre ground can now fight back.

  CHAPTER 1: A Perfect Family Storm: The Shaping of a Culture Warrior

  The child lay tensely in the darkness, in a bed that was not her own. A crisis had placed her there, an impending and unimaginable horror which only one person could prevent.

  That day, her predictable daily routine had been dramatically interrupted. Startled and alarmed, the nine-year-old had been extracted from her classroom and taken by her mother to stay with Pearl, her mother’s sister, because her father’s youngest sister, Marie, was very ill.

  Her mother was distracted, not herself. The child, who had no siblings and who lived inside her mother’s skin, was full of dread. This was a family emergency with which her mother would have to deal, because, as everyone knew, she was the only one who could. But the child knew what others did not know, that her mother lived on the edge of a personal precipice from which only the child could prevent her from falling.

  Late that night, the child heard the phone shockingly shatter the silence like a sob, and then her aunt’s voice rising urgently as she told the person at the other end to ‘hold on’ to herself as Pearl was coming over straightaway. Immediately, the child knew that her mother was at the other end of that call, and that her fragile world had fallen apart.

  After a day or so had passed, the child returned home. She skipped down the steps to the small flat where she lived. At last she would be reunited with her mother, who would be there as usual with her hugs and tender smile to smooth away all pain and ma
ke everything all right again.

  But her home was now frighteningly unfamiliar. The front door was swinging open, the hall mirror covered by a white sheet so the child found herself shockingly effaced when she looked at it, and the flat was full of strangers. The child’s family was Jewish; after bereavement in observant Jewish households, the close family stay home and are visited by comforters during a week of mourning and prayers called a shiva, when by custom mirrors are covered so that the mourners avoid vanity and concentrate on remembering their loved one.

  Disoriented, the child wandered in and was hurried past the closed kitchen door, behind which she could hear someone hysterical and out of control: her mother.

  The child had understood enough, from her mother’s panic-stricken and terse remarks when she had last seen her, to become frozen in horror. Marie had been taken ill with a life-threatening disease. Her own mother, the child’s grandmother, had refused to allow her to be taken to hospital. The child’s mother had taken charge of the situation too late. Marie, still in her thirties, had died.

  The child understood intuitively that both her parents were consumed by guilt over Marie’s death. The child grieved bitterly for both of them. But she knew she dared not utter a word to them about what had happened. She knew instinctively that to do so would send her mother over the edge of that precipice.

  From that time onwards, Marie’s name was never mentioned again in her hearing by either of her parents. The tragedy hung over the family in a pall of silence. And so the child’s universe was permanently darkened by a terrifying shadow, for Marie’s death seemed to her to confirm the presence of a monster in her life.

  To the child, her grandmother had not only killed Marie but had also reduced another daughter to a kind of zombie and had kept the third in metaphorical chains. And worst of all, she had turned the child’s father into a kind of permanent child himself, incapable of doing what a husband and father should do.

  For in her young mind, her damaged father had failed in turn to protect her mother from this monstrous blight on her life. But worse still, he had also failed in something she would only much later come to realise – to provide a crucial escape valve to protect the child from the person she loved more dearly than she could ever love herself.

  I was that child. The trauma associated with that family catastrophe has haunted me all my life. But it has taken me a long time fully to understand why those events had such an impact. For behind that tragedy – awful enough in itself as it was – lay a nexus of unhealthy, mind-bending, and destructive family relationships which were indelibly to shape my character and attitudes.

  It was to be many years before I came to understand even that there was anything wrong with these suffocating bonds, let alone start to struggle free of them. The ensuing separation involved intense anguish. And it was mirrored and indeed intimately wrapped up with another deeply painful separation, as my political and professional life during more than a quarter of a century became convulsed by developments which led me inexorably to leave my political family behind.

  Indeed, just as my real family background shaped what I originally was, so finally separating myself from it helped shape what I was to become. And I have felt that traumatic political journey also as a kind of bereavement. My personal and political lives have flowed in and out of each other as if they were tributaries of one great tempestuous river.

  I grew up in a family that was typical of the post-Second World War British Jewish community. It was Jewish but not very religious. My parents observed the Jewish dietary rules quite strictly, but worked on Saturdays, observing the Sabbath merely through the ritual Friday night meal, and attended synagogue only three times a year on the High Holy Days.

  Always self-conscious about being outsiders in British society, they kept their heads down and tried to assimilate by aping the class mannerisms of the English; my father, Alfred, for example, wore a bowler hat which he perched on his head at an insouciant angle, thus ruining the illusion. After all, he was not a bourgeois or professional, but sold women’s dresses to shopkeepers from a van; it was my mother, Mabel, who had aspirations to social advancement. That bowler hat was thus always a source of acute embarrassment to me, and perhaps contributed to my lifetime dislike of pretentiousness and social climbing.

  They had met in London and married a couple of years after the war. Both came from similar families — working-class and lower-middle-class Jews who had arrived in Britain from Russia and Poland around the turn of the twentieth century – but with one significant difference. My mother was half a social class above my father because her parents, unlike his who had emigrated from Poland, had been born in Britain.

  My mother’s father was a signwriter, my father’s father, a tailor’s cutter. Both my parents were born in London’s East End, that collection of impoverished streets which were home to so many immigrant Jews, as they are today to fresh generations of incomers.

  My mother’s family, which moved to slightly more genteel surroundings on the boundary with Essex, was hardly well-off, but my father’s family was extremely poor. My father’s father – who, according to family mythology, was given the name Phillips because the immigration officer couldn’t pronounce his Polish name — would stand on the street corner every week in the often unrealised hope of being selected for work.

  My father was haunted all his life by the poverty he endured in the East End. He slept four to a room with his sisters; he never had enough to eat. His innate intelligence hit an early cul-de-sac when his parents turned down the grammar school place he had won because they couldn’t afford the school uniform, and he left school at the age of thirteen.

  Unlike most other Jews from similarly impoverished backgrounds, however, Alfred never prospered enough to do what they eventually managed to do and move into the leafy suburbs. Never understanding the value of property, he died with hardly any savings in the same rented flat in Hammersmith, West London, where he and my mother had lived for half a century. He and Mabel stuck fiercely stuck to the socialist political assumptions that had been an absolute given in their own backgrounds – that there was a boss class and a working class, and that we should never forget (despite my mother’s more genteel aspirations) that we belonged to the latter.

  Alfred possessed no resources, neither intellectual nor financial, no hinterland of aspiration fulfilled by any subsequent autodidactic determination to fill in the gaps. In truth, he had very little – but he did have me, his only child, of whom he was so poignantly proud. My mother was different. Sensitive and artistic, she had briefly trained as a fashion designer before illness cut that short and she went to work instead in an uncle’s shop.

  Without question, all this helped shape my fundamental attitudes, which remain unchanged to this day. Although my parents were not overly religious in the formal sense, I was brought up on strong Jewish values of family obligation, a fierce sense of right and wrong, and the unquestionable assumption that the more fortunate amongst us had an absolute duty to help those who were worse off.

  It was Mabel, however, who was the formative influence on my life. I was an only child, and there was simply no space at all between my mother and me. We flowed into each other. I adopted her views, her mannerisms, her likes and dislikes. I knew her thoughts before she even thought them, and she mine. I was her passionate partisan.

  She was witty, elegant, capable, intelligent, sensitive, and beautiful. Other girls had mothers who were too loud, too quiet, too mumsyish, too interfering, too distant, too judgmental. Not mine. In my eyes, she was perfect.

  She was the largest thing in my life, the sun that blotted out all other planets. She poured everything she had into me. It was she who decided that, despite the family’s modest income, I would be educated at private schools. She made all the decisions about my life.

  It was she who gave me a love of books and of reading; she took me to the ballet and the theatre. My father was never part of these expeditions. And it was she who
mainly imparted those values – an iron sense of duty, a strong belief in fairness, and in standing up for what was right.

  But she was emotionally very frail. When she was sixteen, she had had a nervous breakdown after her father died of tuberculosis in 1940. Quite why she had been so badly affected, I never discovered: the subject was taboo. But for the rest of her life she suffered psychological problems.There was some baffling sense of guilt, certainly, but that wasn’t all. She had a morbid fear of germs and a terror of disease. She would wash her hands, or certain objects such as saucepans, in the same obsessional routines – so many sluices or turns of the tap one way, and then so many in the other. When she locked the front door, the keys had to be turned in a particular rhythm. Then she would rest the flat of her hand on the door and push it a required number of times, to make sure it was shut. If she was interrupted in any of these routines, she would have to start all over again.

  It was all a desperate need to make her world an orderly place under her control, to stop it from disintegrating.

  I knew she’d been very ill after I was born. Breast abscesses, I was told. She’d been in hospital with me as a result for a couple of months. It seems a long time for treating abscesses.

  It was because she’d been so long in hospital, my mother told me repeatedly, that she had got into the way of thinking that everything needed to be disinfected all the time, ‘just like the nurses did’. I regarded this as a totally reasonable explanation, just as I never questioned the saucepan-sluicing or the front door-pushing. How could it have been otherwise? My mother was perfect.

  But she was also fragile and had to be protected. I was her guardian and her protector. It never even occurred to me that that was properly my father’s role. Was he not, after all, just an overgrown child?

  I was the focal point of my mother’s existence – and, in my mind, the core of her fragility. I knew that because she told me. She was all-powerful, organised, and organising, and yet I knew that one snap of my fingers in her face and I could destroy her.