Melanie Phillips (born 4 June 1951) is an English public commentator. She began her career writing for The Guardian and New Statesman. She currently writes for The Times, The Jerusalem Post, the Jewish News Syndicate, and The Jewish Chronicle, covering political and social issues from a socially conservative Zionist perspective.
During the 1990s, critics alleged that Phillips became increasingly associated with right-wing politics and the far-right, and her work has been linked by some commentators to the Eurabia conspiracy theory.* Phillips and her supporters have disputed these characterisations, describing her views as stemming from consistent concern for social policy and extremism. She has stated: "I haven't changed. I am still fighting for what I perceive to be truth, justice and a concern for the vulnerable." Others, in 2003, pointed to her long career across a range of publications and her receipt of the Orwell Prize as evidence that her views are not easily categorised. Phillips has also described herself, quoting the prominent neoconservative Irving Kristol, as a "liberal who has been mugged by reality".
Phillips has appeared as a panellist on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Moral Maze and BBC One's Question Time. She was awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 1996, while she was writing for The Observer. Her books include the memoir Guardian Angel: My Story, My Britain.
Early life Melanie Phillips was born in Hammersmith, the daughter of Mabel (née Cohen) and Alfred Phillips. Her family is Jewish, and emigrated to Britain from Poland and Russia. Her grandfather changed his name to "Phillips" as British immigration officials were unable to pronounce his surname.Melanie Phillips: she's putting the world to rights - The Observer, 12 May 2013 She describes her family as living as outsiders in an impoverished area of London, who "kept their heads down and tried to assimilate by aping the class mannerisms of the English". Her father, Alfred, was a dress salesman, while her mother, Mabel, ran a children's clothes shop, and both were committed Labour voters. She has stated that her father was "gentle, kind, and innocent", an "overgrown child", and that "as my other parent, he just wasn't there", which taught her "how the absence of proper fathering could screw up a child for life". She was educated at Putney High School, a girls' fee-paying independent school in Putney, London. Later, she read English at St Anne's College, Oxford.The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History, ed. William D. Rubinstein, et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 753.
Journalism career Phillips trained as a journalist on the Evening Echo, a local newspaper in Hemel Hempstead. After winning the Young Journalist of the Year award in 1976, she spent a short period at New Society magazine.
She joined The Guardian newspaper in 1977, becoming its social services correspondent and social policy leader writer. In 1982, she defended the Labour Party at the time of the split with the Social Democratic Party. In 1984, she became the paper's news editor, and was reported to have fainted on her first day.Peter Hillmore "NS Profile - Melanie Phillips", New Statesman, 10 March 2003 Her opinion column began in 1987. While working for The Guardian, Phillips was persuaded by playwright and theatre director Julia Pascal to write a play called Traitors, which Pascal then directed. It was performed at the Drill Hall from January 1986. The play was set at the time of the 1982 Lebanon War, and centred on 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.Peter, John. "Amoral acquiescence". The Sunday Times. 26 January 1986. According to Phillips, writing in December 2017, it was the only positive review the play received.
Phillips left The Guardian in 1993, stating 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 sister-paper The Observer, then to The Sunday Times in 1998, before beginning her association with the tabloid Daily Mail in 2001. She also wrote for The Jewish Chronicle, The Jerusalem Post, and other periodicals.
In November 2010, The Spectator and Phillips apologised, and agreed to pay substantial compensation and legal costs to a prominent British Muslim whom they falsely accused of anti-Semitism. The following year, Phillips resigned from the magazine after it apologised, and paid compensation, for another of her pieces which, it said, contained an allegation that was "completely false"; the New Statesman reported The Spectator paid compensation and costs of "tens of thousands of pounds".
Since 2003, she has written a blog, once hosted by The Spectator, but following her resignation from the magazine in June 2011, it is hosted on her website. In September 2013, it emerged that her Mail column was to end, although, according to Phillips, the newspaper wanted her to continue to write features and other articles for it.William Turvill "Melanie Phillips bows out after 12 years as Mail columnist, Dominic Lawson tipped to replace her", Press Gazette, 12 September 2013
In 2013, she launched an e-book publishing company called emBooks, to promote her book, together with several others, and self-promotional merchandise to the US market. She currently writes for The Times.
She had a weekly radio show on Voice of Israel, an internet radio station, is a regular panellist on BBC Radio's The Moral Maze, and appears frequently on the BBC's TV political shows, Question Time and The Daily Politics.
Views and opinions The BBC has said that Phillips "is regarded as one of the [British] media's leading right-wing voices", and a "controversial" columnist.List of Panelists for Question Time, BBC website, 6 June 2007. Nick Cohen wrote in 2011 that she has become vilified by The Guardian. Phillips herself stated in 2006, during an interview with Jackie Ashley for the newspaper, that it often misrepresents her opinions.
International issues Irish independence Phillips expressed opposition to Irish independence, declaring on 7 March 2017 in her column in The Times, that the "most troublesome bits" of the UK are "showing signs of disuniting". For her, Scottish nationalism and Irish republicanism are cultural phenomena "rooted in romanticism and myth", while Englishness "came to stand proxy for all the communities of the British Isles". In particular, she wrote, "Ireland itself has a tenuous claim to nationhood" because the Irish Free State was only established in 1922. She denounced "attempts at secession by tribes" in Northern Ireland. The Irish Times said that the piece had met with objections from both unionists and republicans. The Irish ambassador to the United Kingdom, Daniel Mulhall, said on Twitter that the country's sovereignty is "based on strong sense of identity, distinctive culture & shared values and interests", and rejected her claim.
She is ambivalent about the Northern Ireland peace process, stating that, on the one hand, it has strengthened the Union with Great Britain, and saved lives, but that, on the other hand, it has rewarded terrorism, "undermined the rule of law", and exchanged bombs for "paramilitary, mafia-style control of some areas of Northern Ireland"."The Faustian pact of the Northern Ireland Peace Process" . Melanie Phillips. 23 June 2004. Retrieved 26 April 2014. In June 2014, in the context of Britain's first entirely secret trial for centuries, Phillips said that such legal proceedings are justifiable in certain circumstances.
Islam Phillips was criticised for an article she wrote in The Jewish Chronicle which suggested that "the taunt of Islamophobia is used to silence any criticism of the Islamic world, including Islamic extremism", and "facilitates" anti-Semitism. The newspaper's editor, while not offering regret for publishing the article, did acknowledge that the article had been divisive, and apologised to readers who had been angered or upset by the piece. Simon Kuper, writing in the Financial Times, accused her in 2011 of being an advocate for the Eurabia conspiracy theory.
Iran Phillips is a staunch critic of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and has written and spoken frequently about the threat she perceives it to be, particularly if it were to obtain nuclear weapons. She has drawn criticism for her hard-line approach from commentators at The Guardian.
Israel Phillips's criticisms of liberal Jews who disagree with her positions on Israel have been mocked or condemned by writers such as Alan Dershowitz, Rabbi David Goldberg,"... it would have to be someone particularly dim who begins a conversation with me at one of those north London dinner parties where writers such as... Melanie Phillips... claim to have been shocked by the anti-semitic hostility of the chattering classes..." in "Let's have a sense of proportion" by Rabbi David Goldberg, The Guardian, 26 January 2002 and Jonathan Freedland, who criticised Phillips's labelling of Independent Jewish Voices, a group of liberal Jews, as "Jews For Genocide". Freedland wrote in The Jewish Chronicle: "Now, as it happens, I have multiple criticisms of IJV ... but even their most trenchant opponents must surely blanch at the notion that these critics of Israel and of Anglo-Jewish officialdom are somehow in favour of genocide—literally, eager to see the murder and eradication of the Jewish people ... it is an absurdity, one that drains the word 'genocide' of any meaning".
Gaza and Palestine In March 2024, Phillips said on BBC Question Time that it was "completely untrue" that Gazans were being denied access to food and humanitarian aid, that photos and videos on YouTube showed stocked food markets in Gaza, and that supplies had been stopped from going into Gaza because they had been "stolen by Hamas". She also said that the UN was "compromised" by links to Hamas, and that a ceasefire would lead to more deaths. The i Paper fact-checked these claims, and found no evidence to support them.
In October 2025, at a conference called "Rage Against the Hate" organised by Shurat HaDin at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, in her speech, Phillips denied the existence of Palestinians and stated that only Jewish people have any "entitlement" to Palestine. She also stated that the West is facing a "death cult" in the "forces of Islam".
United States Early in the presidency of Barack Obama, Phillips accused him of "adopting the agenda of the Islamist", and of being "firmly in the Islamists' camp". Shortly after Obama's re-election for a second term, Phillips said that, "Four years ago, America put into the White House a sulky narcissist with an unbroken history of involvement in thuggish, corrupt, far-left, black power, Jew-bashing, west-hating politics". She warned that Obama would lead America into a "terrifying darkness". The Independent termed it "rather odd", and an "angry rant".
Phillips wrote in defence of president-elect Donald Trump on 14 November 2016: "Believing the smears they have created, the Trumpophobes then smear the public for voting for the man they have thus smeared. This, of course, is precisely why millions voted against the liberal establishment and for Trump, as well as for Brexit, in the first place".