Trevor Phillips: ‘My immigrant parents did it the hard way. People paying to cross the Channel cheat the system’.
Sir Trevor Phillips hopes to present a ‘more nuanced’ political chat show, and reflects on the small boats crisis and his own upbringing
Sir Trevor Phillips is in a gloriously garrulous mood. We’re discussing how being a former Labour Party politician might affect his impartiality in his new role as the host of Sunday Morning Sky News’s flagship political show, and it swiftly becomes clear it won’t be an issue – it sounds like everyone in the Parliamentary lobby hates him.
“These people are not my mates,” he begins, cheerily settling himself into a bustling, no-frills back office at Sky News HQ. “They don’t really like someone who is not one of their own, coming in and being prominent.
“I’m going to be perfectly cordial and courteous and interested in people, but I don’t need their approval. You can’t be part of the club.”
Raised between British Guiana (now Guyana), Wood Green in north London, and an alumni of Imperial College, not being part of the club is clearly what makes Phillips tick. He jokingly refers to his career as “his long and unfortunate history”: there was the sparring with Ken Livingstone over issues of multiculturalism during his tenure as chairman of the London Assembly in the early noughties, during which Phillips espoused the virtues of integration rather than separatism, lest we “sleepwalk to segregation”.
Under Jeremy Corbyn he was briefly suspended from the party over allegations of Islamophobia in 2020, after calling British Muslims a “nation within a nation” (a suspension Phillips believes was simply payback for saying he couldn’t support Labour’s tolerance for anti-Semitism).
In between was his five-year tenure leading the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which was dogged by rumours of dissent and departures.
Phillips, 69, is that rare thing: a Left-wing politician that doesn’t make the Right wing spit out their coffee. And when it comes to next year’s election his prediction is that “the Tories could win, but they will win in spite of the Conservative Party. Labour could win, but it will win in spite of its leader”.
His first show is broadcast this Sunday, taking over from Sophy Ridge. His interview style is more nuanced than the interviewers of old – he doesn’t want it to be just a “joust between blokes”.
“I don’t think that nowadays anybody’s that interested in seeing alpha males slug it out to see who is the smartest. They want to know what’s going to happen to my mortgage.”
Still, Jeremy Paxman is a friend. “I love him to pieces ... but I think one of the worst things that happens in the political interview is the popularising of the idea: ‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me’.” He says every politician featured on his show “is going to get a fair whack”.
“The fundamental point about all politics is this. It’s always about choice. And the point about the choice is that it’s never between good and bad. It’s always between bad and worse. My job is to compel the decision maker to be honest about those choices.”
Phillips knows a thing or two about tough decisions. He’s been at the sharp end of management, having been a producer at London Weekend Television before heading up the London Assembly.
Would he have expanded Ulez? Although he has given up his car, he says he wouldn’t. “It doesn’t seem to me that the likely impact is great enough to compensate for the impact on ordinary working people.”
Then came his leadership of the EHRC: one of the most difficult decisions he had to take there, he says, was to close down adoption agencies that would not take same-sex couples … a decision that also had racial implications.
“The community I come from would wholly support the idea that same-sex couples should not be given children. It was a very unpopular position amongst minority communities. But there are LGBT people who say: ‘What about us?’ I chose the side of equality, rather than my tribe.”
He reckons that a lot of people thought the EHRC should just be a state-sponsored pressure group, whose job it was to complain. But Phillips also wanted to be a problem solver. “When you actually do politics seriously, there’s always going to be people who don’t like you.”
Perhaps he does fit in after all: ironically, all this tussling has led to an empathy with those who put their head above the parapet … even in politics. He certainly has no truck for naive, binary idealism.
“The people who sneer at politicians are generally people who’ve never made a decision, bigger than what colour socks to wear today,” he says. “I think that the whole scepticism around politicians is just not right. Most of them try to do their best. Some of them are not very good at it.
“Some of them maybe are not very courageous. Some of them are completely mad. But almost all of the serious people are doing what they’re doing because they believe it to be right, not purely out of ego.
“I think there’s a bias against authority. There is a belief that anybody who actually is in charge, somewhere, is just kind of a bad guy. And I really hate that. It’s bad for a democracy.”
Phillips has long been a flagbearer for free speech. He’s supported Toby Young’s Free Speech Union, and lambasted the Left for its insidious war on it. Take the toxic trans debate: “It would have been a good idea, when the whole JK Rowling thing started [when she was cancelled over her views on transgender rights], instead of people going, ‘Oh, well, you know, we’ve got to have a balance and all that’, they’d said, ‘you may not like what JK Rowling said. And if you don’t like it, it’s open to you to argue’.”
Phillips’s comments on race have prompted plenty of arguments too, of course: so are we still sleepwalking to segregation?
“I don’t think we are as dim-witted as we were in 2005, when I said that. I still think that, as a country, we are not paying as much attention to encouraging the process of integration as we might do.
London, ahead of the last census, lost about 600,000, youngish, white people. It became more minority. And even within London, minority groups were mixing but they were mixing with each other.
“I think that there is a complacency about the extent to which our version of multiculturalism is working. Go to a town in the North West, Burnley or Preston, or Leicester, and you will find people get on perfectly well at work. But at 5pm they go back to the streets, in which everybody who lives there are people like themselves. Now, none of this is a crime. But it is not consequence free.”
Phillips, the youngest of ten children, was born in London to British Guianan parents (his father a railway worker, his mother a seamstress) who emigrated in 1950, two years after the first wave of immigrants set sail from the West Indies to London on the HMT Empire Windrush. In 1998, he and his brother, Michael, wrote the book Windrush: 75 Years of Modern Britain.
He thinks immigration remains a big political issue. “We are now beginning to treat all immigrants as though they are a single mass: asylum seekers, people who come legally, people who are here because of family reunification, and people who basically just cheat the system.
We’ve got to find who the illegal immigrants are – we’re now talking about upwards of a million people – very little effort is going into that, because actually, it benefits quite a lot of people.”
Secondly, once you have found illegal immigrants, they should be treated fairly. Most people of a migrant background will take that view because most of us did it the hard way.
The aunt who brought me up in British Guiana, who, equal to my parents, is the most important person to me in the world, could not come to my marriage, because we weren’t going to cheat the system and get her here by some dodgy means.
“I think it’s reasonable that those people resent the sense that people who are young, able bodied and if you’re paying to cross the Channel, well-off, can cheat the system.”
Turning to his show, he’s hoping to get his friend the author Salman Rushdie, recently subject to an attack by an alleged Iranian sympathiser, on as a guest. “If you’re going to talk about what the government should be doing about freedom of speech there’s probably nobody in the world better qualified to talk about that,” says Phillips.
Also on the wishlist? Jamie Dimon, the boss of JP Morgan, so that viewers can properly understand the cost of living crisis.
He will also be talking about mental health, particularly with young people, which has a deeply personal resonance: in 2021, Phillips lost his 36-year-old daughter, Sushila, to anorexia.
“There is no day I don’t think about her. She was also, in many ways, my collaborator, and actually doing the show wakes some of that up. She left an imprint on all of us.’
Phillips has another daughter, Holly, both from his first marriage to Asha Bhownagary, a child psychotherapist. He is currently married to Helen Veale, a TV producer.
His daughters, he says, have done the “hardest thing for anybody in the leadership or a public role to hear. They could say to me, ‘yeah, that is a really good idea’. But you know what? Somebody else could get away with that, but you can’t”.
You have to really trust somebody not to go ‘what are you saying?’ So I miss Sushila. I miss her immensely.”
He turns 70 in December, and this seems like the ideal way to spend his semi-retirement. Is this the more dignified option instead of Strictly?
“Ha ha! Honestly, just put it down to drugs. it’s fine,” he laughs. “Me and Kim Kardashian talk all the time!”
Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips starts at 8.30am on Sky News on Sept 3
