Guardian Angel

by Melanie Phillips

  Others could and did manage such problems in that post far more effectively than I did. The key to it all was office politics, to which I was congenitally unsuited. It also didn’t help that there seemed to be no common language between myself and the backbench. Theirs was a deeply macho culture. Their interests were football, cricket, and drinking, not necessarily in that order. Evenings were spent propping up the bar in the pub where they would stand, beer glass in hand, legs apart and jingling coins in their pockets. I had never previously even been into a London pub. I joined them and drank fruit juice, always seemed to miss the cue at which someone else said ‘Another round? Here, let me...’ and would soon be gasping for breath in the nauseating and then omnipresent fog of cigarette smoke.

  Nor had I any knowledge of or interest in football or cricket. In desperation the night editor, who for some reason had taken a shine to me, took me off for the day to a Test Match at Lord’s in order to teach me the rules of cricket and thus provide me with the rudiments of communication. For the language of the backbench sub-editors was composed overwhelmingly of cricketing metaphors, cryptic half-sentences, and in-jokes. Peter Preston, of course, habitually concealed his thinking like a squid squirting ink. As I shuttled unhappily between his office and the news desk, I felt as if I was ricocheting between the Mad Hatter’s tea party and a sports club speaking Mandarin Chinese.

  It would not be entirely accurate to say I had fallen victim to anti-woman prejudice. There were women on that desk who manoeuvred around it without a problem; they could hold their own on the subject of football’s First Division, and were themselves to be found in the pub sinking halves of bitter. But alas, even the trip to Lord’s didn’t turn me into one of the lads.

  What also horrified me was the bent or craven nature of so much of the reporting. Whether for reasons of ideology or out of fear of upsetting their contacts, many of the reporters simply refused to do what I believed to be the essence of journalism – follow where the evidence trail led you, dig out what someone didn’t want you to know, and upset as many vested interests as possible in order to bring information to the public.

  Instead, the political ‘lobby’ – reporters possessing the all-important parliamentary pass allowing them to stand at the entrance to the chambers of the Commons and Lords and thus gain access to politicians – were utterly resistant to doing anything that might break the rules of that exclusive club. So they tended to hunt in packs, deciding between them what the political story was – even when it was actually something rather different – acting as conduits for politicians planting information and refusing to write anything that might upset them.

  Similarly, other specialist reporters were effectively the captives of their contacts. This was particularly true in education. By now I had been looking for schools for my own children and I could see for myself that teaching had been hijacked by left-wing ideology. Instead of being taught to read and write, children were being left to play in various states of anarchy on the grounds that any exercise of adult authority was oppressive and would destroy the innate creativity of the child.

  But when I tried to persuade the education team to tackle this, I hit a brick wall. Not only were they reluctant to challenge their contacts but, even more significantly, they just didn’t see what I saw — because they themselves wore the same left-wing blinkers as the educationists who were the problem.

  Some of the reporters were excellent: one whom I had hired, Peter Murtagh, won a press award for his investigative reporting. When he got his breakthrough on that story, he was so excited he rang me and we met in a West End restaurant late one Saturday evening to exult together over his triumph. That was what I loved – breaking great stories, working with the reporters to develop and shape them, helping bring to the public news that no-one else was telling them, feeling I was helping make a difference to the world for the better. Those were the good times.

  But in the main, I knew it wasn’t working. I had a wonderful deputy, upon whom I relied too much, but who ultimately could not do what I myself needed to do. The newsroom dead wood remained unpruned. Preston made it clear that he was not going to remove anyone: I just had to make them work better. I hadn’t managed to reform the desk structure. The power of the backbench was stronger than ever. The reporters were truculent, telling Preston that I needed to get a grip. They thought I was impossibly belligerent. In fact, I was being quietly treated for chronic panic attacks.

  Why didn’t I ask for help or to move to another post? Pride, certainly, but also fear. Preston had no time at all for anyone who displayed emotional or psychological fragility. I feared that if I displayed any such weakness, my charmed life at the Guardian would come to an abrupt end.

  In 1987, I was put out of my misery. At that year’s general election I ran, along with the very able junior news desk colleague who I had long suspected (correctly) was being groomed to replace me, three weeks of election coverage which was held to be a great success. After Mrs Thatcher was returned for a third successive term as Prime Minister, Peter Preston took me out to lunch and fired me from the news desk.

  It was done with all the tact and sensitivity for which staff relations at the Guardian were renowned. My new life was sketched out. I was to become an opinion columnist (a role regarded in those days with a certain contempt); I was to edit the regular advertising supplement on social policy, which although lucrative, was little regarded; I was also to be invested with the title of Policy Editor, which I was informed was a very important role – even though as far as I could see there was to be no policy that I would actually edit.

  When I inquired what being Policy Editor actually meant, I was told that if I didn’t accept this deal that very important title would be conferred upon another named colleague who, as a result, would then be superior to me in the office pecking order. For once, there was no cloud of squirted ink, just brutal clarity.

  When the news of my change of circumstance became known, Richard Gott – who despite his Olympian disdain for the petty bourgeoisie had always behaved kindly towards me — stopped by my desk. ‘Put out to grass with a column then,’ he said in grim sympathy. But if anyone thought that my writing would henceforth sink like a stone and drag me down with it into obscurity, they were about to be disabused.

  CHAPTER 6: Stumbling Into the Culture Wars

  Not that I set out to make waves – far from it. What was about to happen took me entirely by surprise.

  In my second column, I wrote in support of the introduction by the Conservative government of a deeply contentious national curriculum, which represented a desperate attempt to ensure that teachers actually started teaching children something at school. I wrote that, while the better-off could buy their way out of the system through living in leafy suburbs or sending their children to private schools, the poor were trapped by lousy local schools to which there was no alternative for their own children.

  The reaction was instant and seismic. There was only one permitted explanation for the crisis in Britain’s schools, and that was the spending cuts imposed by the heartless Thatcher government. To suggest that it might actually have had a point about the breakdown of teaching was simply unthinkable. Literally overnight, I became ‘right-wing’. My Guardian colleagues gazed at me in perplexity and dismay. The fact that I had written with passion about the plight of poor people was totally disregarded. ‘This is a Daily Mail view’, I was told – the greatest possible crime and insult, since in such circles the Mail is considered to be so right-wing it is off the graph.

  How had I reached this heretical position? By the staggering tactic of actually observing what was going on. I had looked at the local state-funded schools for my own young children and found them seriously wanting – not because they lacked money, but because the teachers had increasingly abandoned structured teaching. There were two decent primary schools in my area. I could get my children into neither – they were hugely over-subscribed. In the end I gave up and sent my children to in
dependent schools. But I could afford it; I knew most could not. As ever, I was concerned about those at the bottom of the heap.

  Desperate parents and teachers intimidated by the education orthodoxy wrote to me in support. Friends and colleagues said I was a reactionary Gradgrind. Yet how could it be progressive to support an approach which inflicted its most devastating damage upon children at the bottom of the social heap, who depended absolutely on school to lift them out of disadvantage but who were being left ignorant, illiterate, and innumerate?

  Galvanised by the reaction which suggested that things were far worse than I had realised, I wrote more about education. I wrote about the refusal to teach Standard English on the grounds that this was ‘elitist’. How could this be? I had seen firsthand in my own under-educated family that an inability to control the language meant an inability to control their own lives. My Polish grandmother had not been able to fill in an official form without help; my father just didn’t have the words to express complicated thoughts, and would always lose out against those who looked down at him from their educated pedestal.

  I also observed that those putting such pressure on these teachers from the education establishment were the supercilious upper middle classes, who had no personal experience whatsoever of what it was actually like to be poor and uneducated or an immigrant but were nevertheless imposing their own ideological fantasies onto the vulnerable – and harming them as a result. Teachers wrote to me in despair at the pressure not to impose Standard English on children on the grounds that this was discriminatory. They knew that, on the contrary, this was to abandon those children to permanent servitude and ignorance.

  Late that same year I wrote about how black parents in inner London were cheering on the government’s education reforms; they despaired of a system which they thought had so grievously failed two generations of black children. But at the so anti-racist Guardian, the views of those black parents simply counted for nothing. The left-wing Inner London Education Authority could never be wrong; the Tory government could never be right.

  In 1990 I wrote that deteriorating education standards had little to do with low pay for teachers or schools starved of money. It was teachers and teaching that made the difference to children’s lives. The problem was the number of bad teachers who were turning good teachers into a beleaguered minority, in what I described as ‘the vicious circle of an education establishment that perpetuates its own myths down through generations of poorly taught children’ (Guardian, 2 March 1990).

  Reaction to this column was so extreme that I devoted a further piece to it alone. There, I recorded that in the space of two weeks I had been described as ‘ignorant, silly, intellectually vulgar, vicious, irresponsible, elitist, middle-class, fatuous, dangerous, intemperate, shallow, strident, reactionary, near-hysterical, propagandist, simplistic, well-paid, unbalanced, prejudiced, rabid, venomous, and pathetic’. Three-quarters of the letters I received had been hostile. Traditional teaching was equated with drilling, Dickens, and the ‘new right’, and my real crime was to have dared to air such arguments at all.

  But it was the letters of support which were the most startling, and shed a devastating light on the situation they described as ‘insanity’. One educational psychologist wrote: ‘I greet with relief the beginning of debate about modern teaching practices. In my job I see small children whose listening skills and ability to stay focused on a task are chronic – yet they are put to learn in an environment which no undergraduate would have to suffer… Sometimes a brave teacher does arrange the tables so that each child has a space of his or her own; the children love it, but the teacher has to move the tables back again. Children do not learn through play… but through instruction, explanation, guidance, motivation from an adult. Children need to be taught to make connections, to look for meanings. They do not learn from Wendy houses or from computers, they learn from people. And whenever I say this to a group of teachers, the older and wiser members of the group come to me afterwards and thank me for saying it; they have been waiting for years for someone to make this point. But for some reason they cannot say this in public. And neither can I; which is why I do not want my name published. My job is important to me, and public condemnation of teaching methods will not be approved. But in an odd way, I cannot really pinpoint who will disapprove’ (Guardian, 26 March 1990).

  When I saw that particular letter, a chill came over me. It was at that point that I realised something very bad indeed was happening to Britain. What was being described was more akin to life in a totalitarian state. Dissent was being silenced, and those who ran against the orthodoxy were being forced to operate in secret; worse still, the very meaning of concepts such as education, teaching, and knowledge was being unilaterally altered, and thousands of children, particularly those at the bottom of the social heap, were being abandoned to ignorance and institutionalised disadvantage.

  If ever there was an abuse of power for journalists to investigate, this was surely it. But for most of my colleagues, it was I who was out of step. In due course, a couple of more independent-minded thinkers successively took on the education reporting brief, and so on each occasion I had an ally in the newsroom. But it was still very much, at any one time, only the two of us contra mundum.

  It was not just my professional world which started to crack apart in 1987. For some time, I had been aware that something seemed to be badly troubling my mother. My father also seemed to be suffering: there was clearly some kind of unspoken problem between them. In June 1987 they were to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. I was planning to hold a party for them in our garden, but my mother was being difficult about this: disengaged, even churlish. As I had always done, I internalised the anxiety and trod gingerly around the usual eggshells to avoid provoking the always-feared collapse.

  One Saturday afternoon, when they came for tea as they did every week, I finally snapped. I begged her to end the secrecy and tell me just what was going on. And so in a flat voice she told me. Three years previously, her neurologist had finally told her the true nature of her ‘condition’. After treating her for 25 years, he was now retiring from practice — and he chose this final consultation to tell her that her ‘condition’ was multiple sclerosis.

  How could this possibly have happened? For the neurologist to have kept this from her meant there must have been in turn a conspiracy of secrecy for a quarter of a century between him, her general practitioner, her psychiatrist, and everyone else who had treated her. She had never been told what was actually wrong with her – until the day her neurologist dumped this knowledge on her and then abandoned her. How could he have been so cruel?

  Yet maybe he had thought that if he put the correct name to her ‘condition’, she might not have been able to cope. And very likely that was correct. My parents knew everything about each other, told each other everything, lived inside each other’s skins. Yet after she learned her true diagnosis, she told no-one and kept it secret from my father for a year; and they both kept it from me for a further two years, until I wrenched it out of her.

  What a dreadful and cruel irony, that someone who did not recognise the boundaries between herself and others should have fallen victim to an auto-immune disease in which the body destroys friendly organisms while embracing those that will attack it. My mother had always needed to maintain total control over matters which should not have concerned her, such as the way she somehow managed to make all relationships between her immediate family members pass through her rather than take place between each other; now she was to lose control over one after another of her own bodily functions. As a child, I had inappropriately been ‘parentified’ by infantilised parents; now my mother was indeed to become dependent and I was to become her carer. Fate had turned what had previously been a set of destructive fantasies into a hideous reality.

  From that moment, it seemed, my mother was caught in a downward spiral which, over the following seventeen years when she also developed Parkinson’s disea
se and vascular dementia, was to rob her progressively of mobility, vision, control of her natural functions, and eventually her mind.

  There are people who, faced with a devastating and progressive disease, refuse to go under. They constantly adapt and, taking every day as it comes, manage to extract from the world around them every ounce of life. My mother was not one of them. Faced with the truth about her illness, she went under. She reacted as she had always done to anything which threatened her carefully controlled world: she pretended it wasn’t so.

  The result was that she refused to accept the help or aids that were offered to her. Without adequate assistance, she allowed her illness to take over. And as her world shrank into a space defined exclusively by her disease, an intolerable burden was dumped on my father. In those terrible years, he looked after her with spaniel-like devotion. Refusing to accept a walking frame, my mother would shuffle around the flat clinging onto a wooden tea-trolley for support. And my father would follow a few paces behind, ready to catch her if she should fall.

  The experience of those years also told me that something was going very wrong with the welfare state. It wasn’t just the lack of provision, which meant that the only care available for my mother from the local authority was a few hours a week with untrained carers who had been recruited off the street. It was also a callousness and indifference amongst the supposedly caring services. It was the hospital nurses who, when my mother broke her hip and through her feebleness was unable to move at all in her hospital bed, left her food and water unwrapped or out of reach and refused to make her comfortable; and the ward sister who, when I complained, told me with a straight face that my mother, who could barely put one foot in front of the other, had a short time before been ‘skipping round the ward’.