Guardian Angel

by Melanie Phillips

  When I was about twelve years old, my mother developed what she described as tingling in her legs and ‘funny feelings’ when she walked too far. She consulted an eminent neurologist whom she saw for the next quarter of a century, during which time she described her nameless and strange affliction as ‘my condition’, which is how the neurologist had described it to her. Neither my father nor I ever thought of questioning this meaningless diagnosis.

  When I went to university, she visibly steeled herself against my departure. I knew it was a crisis. I was leaving her bereft. I couldn’t do that. And so I slipped into a pattern of seeing her every two weeks; either I would go home or my parents would come to Oxford. And of course I would call her several times a week too. Physically in Oxford, I mentally never left home. At best it felt as if I was on the end of a long leash. I was there on licence.

  Oxford, where I read English Literature at St Anne’s College, passed as in a dream. On the last day of finals, everyone else flung off their academic dress and set about having a great time enjoying student life in that beautiful city, punting on the river and partying, finally free of the demands of studying. But as soon as I finished my last exam, I went straight back to London still in my black and white academic uniform, straight to my mother’s shop. It was as if I was saying to her, look, you see, I didn’t really leave you after all.

  But, to my dismay, she did not greet me as I had imagined. She was vacant, detached, barely registering that I was there. She was already sinking into the depression which a few months later would result one night in my father shouting in panic for me to wake up; I was by now on a journalism training course in Cardiff, but still coming home every two weeks. Emerging from my room, I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table as if in a trance, totally immobile and not saying a word. That was the day a psychiatrist arrived and gave her the first of a series of injections, after which she returned to us, still very distant but at least responding to us and no longer immobile. And yet even during my mother’s whole terrifying collapse, still my father never had a proper conversation with me about her or anything personal; nor did I ever attempt to speak to him. It would have felt like disloyalty.

  At Oxford, finally presented with freedom, I still never slipped the leash. I even arrived as an undergraduate with a mother-approved boyfriend from London in tow. Joshua was in his final year studying law when I began reading for my English degree, but I had been going out with him since I was sixteen.

  Joshua was clever, quirky, a dazzlingly witty debater. He was given to bursts of extravagant zaniness – in order to try out his legal expertise he once sued the laundry in Oxford for losing a treasured shirt; on another occasion he hitchhiked from Stockholm to Genoa in order to surprise me on my mother-approved first-ever trip abroad without my parents (I was then eighteen.) But what really hooked me to Joshua – for life, as it turned out – was that he made me laugh. He was fun to be with.

  At Oxford I dabbled in student politics in mildly left-wing circles. I joined in the self-important protests against the low wages and poor working conditions for my college cleaners, and waved placards on demonstrations against the then education minister, one Margaret Thatcher. I grew my hair into a hippie-ish thicket and sloped around affecting a worldly swagger — while inside I was privately shrinking. I was too shy to make more than a tiny number of friends, to whom I subsequently clung, and was permanently intimidated both by my tutors and socially confident fellow students.

  Years later, however, I was told that at the time I myself had given an impression of supreme (and supremely irritating) confidence by holding forth in college. Indeed, I was even elected president of its student body, the junior common room. So how did I manage to give an impression that was so totally at odds with what I actually felt? I believe it was a combination of two things: my facility with words, and a compulsion to place myself at the centre of the stage in order to validate my existence by the approval of an audience.

  So it would appear that journalism and I were ideally suited to each other. What else, after all, drives journalism? Why else would journalists voluntarily put themselves through the daily agonies of writing to nail-biting deadlines, clawing their way over rapacious colleagues, and exposing themselves to the risk of criticism, ridicule, or worse by placing what they write before the public, if not from a compulsion (often doomed) to attract the applause of an audience?

  Not that a life in journalism had always beckoned. At Oxford, after receiving an early and demoralising rebuff, I disdained student journalism altogether as being peopled by unprincipled careerist creeps. Not knowing what I wanted to do in life, I sent off applications for a variety of different careers – and, despite my contempt for student journalism, sent an application just for the hell of it to a newspaper training scheme.

  To my astonishment and no small dismay, this offered me a two-year training post on the Hemel Hempstead Evening Echo, which served a commuter town just north of London. Dismay, because I realised I would have to do what I flinched from doing: put myself about, talk to total strangers, somehow wheedle out of them information they would not want to give me.

  But of course I couldn’t turn such a glittering opportunity down. So I found myself on the Echo, newly married to Joshua, being sent out in misery to doorstep the newly bereaved in order to extract a photograph from them of their deceased loved one, enduring the numbing tedium of local council meetings, writing up court cases of extreme banality (‘get the ****ing sex in the headline!’ I was told), crashing the office cars (I had only recently passed my driving test by the skin of my teeth), and being shouted at by the archetypal news editor who thought university ***ing graduates were ridiculously up-themselves and a total pain in the backside.

  It was great training. I couldn’t get away from there fast enough. With no national newspaper prepared to take me on, however, I gratefully took a post on New Society magazine, a well-respected weekly periodical devoted to worthy articles about social policy. It was a useful stepping-stone.

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

  In 1977, at the age of twenty-six, I joined the staff of the Guardian. The very way I was hired was itself a telling foretaste of the convolutions in store. I had been writing for a year for New Society. While there, I was named Young Journalist of the Year in the annual press awards for my earlier work on the Evening Echo, which brought me to wider attention. Having applied for a reporter’s job at the Guardian, I was wildly excited to be invited for an interview with the editor, Peter Preston. A Fleet Street newspaper! I was dazzled. Not that it was actually in Fleet Street, the legendary home of national newspapers; the Guardian was housed in a squat, featureless building in Clerkenwell, a short distance away. Never mind: the Guardian was one of Britain’s most distinguished and influential national newspapers, the paper of choice for intellectuals, the voice of progressive conscience, and the dream destination for many, if not most, aspiring journalists.

  I prepared assiduously for the encounter. I rehearsed answers to likely questions such as why I wanted to be a reporter, why for the Guardian, what my interests were, my political views, how I saw my career developing.

  I was asked none of these things. Instead, Preston, looking for the most part not at me but at a place on the wall behind me, started by apologising that he could not offer me a specialist reporter’s job and mumbled something unintelligible about being in touch with the details. That was it. At no point was I ever offered, in terms, a job at the Guardian. As in so many encounters at the paper, one was left to intuit osmotically through a murk of significant silences and conveniently deniable obfuscation.

  I joined the paper as a general reporter, but, given my previous experience in writing about social issues, soon found myself promoted to be the paper’s social services correspondent. In those early years, I was thrilled to be a Guardian reporter. It was all wonderfully casual, young and fun. Reporters slopped around in jeans and scruffy jackets. I thought that was
delightful. The filing cabinets were bright red. I thought that was delightful. The newsroom had the atmosphere of an Oxbridge junior common room. I thought that was particularly delightful. Joshua and I had moved to west London mainly so that I could be near my parents. Finally, I could enjoy a university atmosphere without any guilt.

  In those early years I myself was treated, most flatteringly, as a talent that had to be carefully nurtured to fulfil some perceived future promise. I felt looked after in particular by two or three senior colleagues who kindly took it upon themselves to act as mentors. I felt loved and cherished. It was as if I were the favoured child of a wonderful and impressive family.

  One day a new reporter arrived. He looked a bit lost and lonely and so I felt sorry for him. I knew just how he felt. I invited him to come and sit at a spare desk next to me and my affable colleague Richard Norton-Taylor. His name was Alan Rusbridger. He turned out to be highly gifted, creative, and musical. His talents seemed to me to be wasted in the newsroom. Taking a kindly interest in his welfare, I suggested that he had it in him to become instead a clever and witty playwright —another Michael Frayn, perhaps. Modestly, he demurred. I thought he was just too diffident ever to achieve what he was clearly capable of doing.

  This was an early sign of my less-than-stellar talent at office politics – my naive tendency to take people at face value and fail to perceive the blade inside the velvet glove. Alan would eventually become editor of the Guardian, displaying a ruthless ambition even greater than his charm, at around the very time that my own increasingly unhappy tenure at Guardian Newspapers was drawing to its traumatic close.

  The Guardian, during the period I was there, was distinguished by two notable characteristics: the endless whingeing and conspiratorial bent of its staff, and their devotion and loyalty to a paper about which they never ceased complaining. What did they whinge about? Well, pretty well everything. They whinged about the way their copy was treated by the sub-editors, about the editorial priorities of the front-page news stories, about the editorial priorities of the inside-page news stories, about any changes to the office furniture or seating arrangements, about the introduction of hideously alien computers (when I joined the staff, copy was typed on typewriters in triplicate with the aid of carbon paper).

  And there were always plots, and dark suspicions about plots, over who was likely to be promoted or moved sideways, over what the presence of this person or that in the editor’s office might signify (traffic into his room was assiduously monitored), or the sinister hidden meaning beneath the latest opaque stream of consciousness from Peter Preston. To some extent, the owhingeing and the plotting resulted from a radical insecurity among the journalists caused by Preston’s much-resented approach to staff management – the ironically named ‘creative tension’ — which the journalists hated because they felt they were being measured against each other.

  But the whingeing and the plotting were surely in the main a by-product of the defining feature of Guardian journalists – a narcissistic self-regard based upon a fixed belief in their own superiority and righteousness, nurtured by indulgence and privilege.

  We believed that the Guardian was simply more civilised than any other newspaper in Britain. Indeed, ‘civilised’ was the word frequently on our lips as we congratulated ourselves for being quite different from the rapacious and unprincipled rogues, spivs, and thugs employed in the rest of Fleet Street. Unlike them, we had no nasty, evil proprietor telling us what line to take. Unlike them, we never ever paid any money for stories, thus compromising the integrity of the information our sources provided. Unlike them, we never descended to the vulgar cesspools of personality or celebrity-driven tittle-tattle. Ugh!

  We were, by contrast, the sea-green incorruptibles, high-minded to a fault, not owned by any plutocrat with a power mania, but run instead by a trust whose sole purpose was to keep the Guardian going in perpetuity in order to continue publishing its elevated journalism. We were the only truly independent paper on which no one told any writer what to write (when The Independent newspaper opened in 1986, the Guardian was beside itself in dismay, indignation, and fury).

  We were above all a writers’ paper, where words were treated with reverence and fine writing was much lionised and encouraged. This remains as true today as it was then. It was not just opinion pieces or feature articles that were carefully crafted, elegant pieces of prose, but the news stories, cricket and football commentaries, and of course the theatre and book reviews. It all radiated education, intelligence, and wit.

  In 1977, the paper published a seven-page supplement about the island of San Serriffe, with advertisements from major companies congratulating the country on the tenth anniversary of its independence. Many readers hardly glanced at the pages of worthy reports on the island’s topography, politics, culture, and so on — such sponsored supplements were common at the time — and so failed to notice that the whole thing was a glorious April 1 spoof. ‘Sans serif’ is a typographical term, and the elaborate description of the fictional island — supposedly shaped like a semi-colon — was studded with typographical and printers’ puns. It fooled many and passed into folklore: an extended joke that actually made money. How proud we all were to work for such a clever, amusing, and brilliant paper!

  We also admired what we told ourselves was the paper’s historically noble and principled stand in defence of liberty and justice and against oppression. We were proud of its nonconformist origins as the Manchester Guardian and proud of its legendary former editor CP Scott who coined the dictum ‘comment is free but facts are sacred’. It was only later that I realised there was more than a shred of truth in the old joke that Guardian news stories freely spun the facts while its editorial comment columns treated opinion as sacred.

  No one ever mentioned the paper’s unfortunate support in the 1930s for Stalinism, when it sacked its Moscow correspondent Malcolm Muggeridge after he had tried to report the effects of the bureaucrat-induced famine in the Ukraine and Caucasus, when some six million people starved to death. To us, however, Malcolm Muggeridge – who in his later years had become a Catholic moral campaigner – was in his old age merely a synonym for the kind of closed-minded, right-wing reactionary who inveighed against sex and violence in British society.

  For progressives like us, such people did not evoke merely an intellectual disdain. There was also a strong element of aesthetic distaste. People on the right seemed unattractively crabby and sour. People on the left had an altogether more generous view of human nature and the world. Whereas the right seemed to believe the worst of people, we believed the best. They embodied darkness; we embodied light. They were about the past; we were always looking to the future. They stood for feathering their own nests and defending the indefensible status quo. We stood for fairness and equality, for protecting the weak and vulnerable, for standing against tyranny and prejudice.

  We were the embodiment of virtue itself. Everybody who was not one of us automatically placed themselves beyond the moral pale, on the other side from all that was good and decent and just. Whatever we said was, by definition, morally correct. Whatever they said could therefore be safely discounted. Everyone who was not one of us was the opposite of us. We were the left; therefore everyone who was not the left was the right. The right was evil; everyone not on the left was therefore evil.

  The word ‘Manichaean’ was not at that time part of my vocabulary.

  Not that I actually regarded myself as a left-winger. I always thought of myself as a liberal, which to me was another way of saying I believed in progress and the capacity of human beings to create a better world. But that was fine – I was a perfect fit at the Guardian because I thought the Guardian was a liberal paper, as indeed it really had been when it was the Manchester Guardian. ‘Liberal’ and ‘left-wing’ were the same thing, I assumed, as they were both used interchangeably with ‘progressive’. Indeed, in Britain the left refers to itself constantly as the ‘liberal left’. Only much later did I reali
se that the left is fundamentally illiberal.

  As the centre of moral gravity, the ‘liberal left’ therefore also constituted the political ‘centre ground’. That meant that everything not on the left was politically extreme. A glancing reference in the Guardian in 2012 illustrated how this appropriation of the centre ground has become axiomatic. Referring to the fact that the sun had shone on a Guardian access weekend, Stephen Moss quipped ‘God is a centrist’(Guardian, 26 March 2012).

  It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this utterly false axiom. For by asserting that it embodied the centre ground, what the left actually did was to hijack the centre ground and substitute its own extreme values — thus shifting Britain’s centre of political and moral gravity to the left, and besmirching as extremists those on the true centre ground. And something very similar has happened in the US, where language has been appropriated in order to engineer a seismic shift in attitudes, concealed by a mind-bending reversal of the meaning of words.

  The story of my trajectory at the Guardian is also the story of how I only slowly realised both the Orwellian nature and shattering significance of what had happened to Britain and the rest of the Western world. But in those early years, when I too was one of the elect, I shared the delusion. If I had been a character in one of the Mister Men books, I would surely have been Little Miss Guardianista.

  On these issues, the left has not changed one iota. What changed was me, as the scales gradually fell from my eyes. But if the left is bewildered by my subsequent self-imposed exile from Eden, those who are not on the left are equally perplexed that I could ever have subscribed to such stupidity, hypocrisy, and moral blindness. To which I can only say, by way of explanation, that it was tribal.