Melanie Phillips
| Melanie Phillips | |
|---|---|
| Born |
4 June 1951 United Kingdom |
| Occupation |
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| Notable credit(s) |
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| Spouse(s) | Joshua Rozenberg |
Melanie Phillips (born 4 June 1951) is a British journalist, author and public commentator. She started on the left of the political spectrum, writing for The Guardian and New Statesman. During the 1990s she came to identify with more right-wing ideas and currently writes for The Times, The Jerusalem Post and The Jewish Chronicle, covering political and social issues from a social conservative perspective. Phillips defines herself as a liberal who has "been mugged by reality".
Phillips has often appeared as a panellist on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Moral Maze and BBC One's Question Time. She has written a number of books, including her memoir Guardian Angel: My Story, My Britain. She was awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 1996, while she was writing for The Observer.
Phillips' family is Jewish, and emigrated to Britain from Poland and Russia. According to her account the name "Phillips" was imposed by British officials who were unable to pronounce her family's Polish name. She describes her family as "poor" people living as outsiders in an impoverished area of London, who "kept their heads down and tried to assimilate". Her father, Alfred, was a dress salesman, 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.
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