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”.

That claim to be ostracised by “the elites”, while spending decades being paid handsomely to share her views in organs of elite opinion such as The Times, is hardly a position unique to Phillips. It’s a line rolled out by columnists so often it’s as familiar as a sitcom catchphrase. Yusuf so excited Phillips by saying young people needed to be “remoralised”, that China was turning Western children trans using TikTok while persuading their young people to become scientists, and that illegal immigration was a “national emergency” fraying the social fabric. It’s such standard right-wing orthodoxy that it’s no surprise it makes Phillips clap like a seal presented with a bucket of fish.

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