Hello and this is a show for you.

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.

I'm Francis Foster.

I'm Constantine Kissen.

And this is a show for you.

If you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about.

A trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts.

Our brilliant guest this week is an author, journalist and social commentator.

Melanie Phillips, welcome to Trigonometry.

Hello, thank you so much for having me.

It's a pleasure to have you here.

It's been a while in the making this interview.

It's great to finally get you on the show.

For anyone who doesn't know who you are, which is not many people these days, but there are some,

I'm sure.

Tell everybody, who are you, how are you where you are, what has been an abridged version of your journey through life?

Oh my goodness. Well I am currently a columnist for the Times newspaper and I do write books and I do quite a lot of broadcasting and a certain amount of public speaking.

And I was known many moons ago probably before you even started to exist because I'm so very old.

I was known to be a guardianista. I worked for the guardian and the observer for the best part of 20 years.

And for the first period of that time I thought that I was one of them and then I realized rather crashingly that I wasn't.

And from then on it was sort of downhill all the way into a pit of infamy in which I progressed to the Sunday Times, which was a kind of

convalescent home, and then the Daily Mail, which was a bit like going from a

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