Mic Wright

Bad Press Awards

Recognising the Worst of the Worst of British Journalism

Melanie Phillips Wins the Mirror Ball for Opinion Writing Self-Regard

One of the challenges of choosing this award every month is making the distinction between those columns that are truly awful and the ones that just contain opinions I don’t agree with. This month’s nominee represents the opposite of that dilemma.

Writing for The Times about Reform UK’s local election successes, Melanie Phillips was delighted because she concluded that Nigel Farage’s party was the political distillation of her philosophy as a columnist.

“If you’ll forgive a touch of self-promotion, [Reform Chairman Zia] Yusuf’s remarks read like a distillation of my own writing since the late 1980s, which the political and cultural elites regarded as at best irrelevant and at worst toxic”, she wrote. “In book after book, I charted what seemed to be an onslaught by those elites on the core institutions and values of Britain and the West”.

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