Melanie Phillips (born 4 June 1951) is an English public commentator. She began her career writing for The Guardian and New Statesman. She currently writes for The Times, The Jerusalem Post, the Jewish News Syndicate, and The Jewish Chronicle, covering political and social issues from a socially conservative Zionist perspective.

During the 1990s, critics alleged that Phillips became increasingly associated with right-wing politics and the far-right, and her work has been linked by some commentators to the Eurabia conspiracy theory. Phillips and her supporters have disputed these characterisations, describing her views as stemming from consistent concern for social policy and extremism. She has stated, "I haven't changed. I am still fighting for what I perceive to be truth, justice and a concern for the vulnerable." Others, in 2003, pointed to her long career across a range of publications and her receipt of the Orwell Prize as evidence that her views are not easily categorised. Phillips has also described herself, quoting the prominent neoconservative Irving Kristol, as a "liberal who has been mugged by reality".

Phillips has appeared as a panellist on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Moral Maze and BBC One's Question Time. She was awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 1996, while she was writing for The Observer. Her books include the memoir Guardian Angel: My Story, My Britain.

Melanie Phillips was born in Hammersmith, the daughter of Mabel (née Cohen) and Alfred Phillips. Her family is Jewish, and immigrated to Britain from Poland and Russia. Her grandfather changed his name to "Phillips" as British immigration officials were unable to pronounce his surname. She describes her family as living as outsiders in an impoverished area of London, who "kept their heads down and tried to assimilate by aping the class mannerisms of the English". Her father, Alfred, was a dress salesman, while her mother, Mabel, ran a children's clothes shop, and both were committed Labour voters. She has stated that her father was "gentle, kind, and innocent", an "overgrown child", and that "as my other parent, he just wasn't there", which taught her "how the absence of proper fathering could screw up a child for life". She was educated at Putney High School, a girls' fee-paying independent school in Putney, London. Later, she read English at St Anne's College, Oxford.

Phillips trained as a journalist on the Evening Echo, a local newspaper in Hemel Hempstead. After winning the Young Journalist of the Year award in 1976, she spent a short period at the New Society magazine.

She joined The Guardian newspaper in 1977, becoming its social services correspondent and social policy leader writer. In 1982, she defended the Labour Party at the time of the split with the Social Democratic Party. In 1984, she became the paper's news editor, and was reported to have fainted on her first day. Her opinion column began in 1987. While working for The Guardian, Phillips was persuaded by Julia Pascal to write a play called Traitors, which Pascal then directed. It was performed at the Drill Hall from January 1986. The play was set at the time of the 1982 Lebanon War, and centred around the moral dilemmas of a Jewish journalist who, as political editor of a liberal magazine, has to decide whether to veto an article written in anti-Semitic tones, and also whether she is right to publish a leaked document about the Falklands War. The play was reviewed by John Peter in The Sunday Times as "a play of blistering intelligence and fearless moral questioning", although he considered it bordering on implausible. According to Phillips, writing in December 2017, it was the only positive review the play received.

Phillips left The Guardian in 1993, stating that her relationship with the paper and its readers had become "like a really horrific family argument". She took her opinion column to The Guardian's sister-paper The Observer, then to The Sunday Times in 1998, before beginning her association with the tabloid Daily Mail in 2001. She also wrote for The Jewish Chronicle, The Jerusalem Post, and other periodicals.

In November 2010, The Spectator and Phillips apologised, and agreed to pay substantial compensation and legal costs to a prominent British Muslim they falsely accused of anti-Semitism. The following year, she resigned from the magazine after it apologised, and paid compensation, for another of her pieces which, it said, contained an allegation that was "completely false"; the New Statesman reported The Spectator paid compensation and costs of "tens of thousands of pounds".