Melanie Phillips at the Launch of the New Culture Forum

Columnist Melanie Phillips at the inaugural meeting of the New Culture Forum on Monday, June 26th at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London.



It took Melanie Phillips three years to get her latest book, Londonistan, into print, she told the inaugural meeting of the New Culture Forum on Monday. ‘Nobody would touch it,’ she said at the event, which was held at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London. ‘One publisher said, ‘I would rather take ricin than publish this.’

The book, which is now in the Amazon bestsellers list and has been widely discussed throughout the media, had started out as an exploration of what Phillips saw as the growth of a new anti-Semitism in the UK, but even at this early stage, before it developed into a study of how the UK became the centre for extreme Islamicist activity, it attracted nothing but blanket rejection from Britain’s publishing houses. It was successfully published in the US, but it wasn’t until a small independent imprint, Gibson Square, came forward, that Londonistan saw the light of day here.

‘If you ask me whether this was down to fear, or more a simple opposition to what I was saying, I would have to say it was the latter,’ she told journalist Peter Whittle, the Director of the New Culture Forum.

Phillips was being interviewed by Whittle before an audience drawn from all sections of the arts and media, from television producers and directors to academics and journalists, who’d come together to launch the Forum, a discussion and debating society which aims to challenge the liberal/left cultural orthodoxy which reigns in the arts and large sections of the media. Phillips is used to the reactions she provokes as a polarising figure, but on this night, she had the largely sympathetic audience eating from the palm of her hand, and the Q & A session went on for a full hour.

http://www.melaniephillips.com/londonistan