A venomous Left-wing witch hunt is out to destroy Trevor Phillips

Quentin Letts of The Daily Mail has written an article that includes two of my favorite subjects...

1. Left-wing Witch Hunts
2. Red Ken Livingstone

Ken Livingstone's loathing of Mr Phillips - Livingstone once accused him of 'pandering to the Right' - was such that he once referred to him at a political meeting as 'that bastard Phillips', and there are some who wonder if the current ructions are being fuelled by Mr Livingstone.

There is no good evidence for this. It seems more likely that the anti-Phillips stuff is being pumped out because, with his denunciation of multiculturalism, Mr Phillips undermined the belief system which has created thousands of public sector jobs.

When ferrets are fighting, it is seldom wise to plunge your hand into the sack to separate them. That way, yowling pain and finger loss lie.

In the case of the squealing, claw-baring squabble currently happening at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, we should make an exception.

The person caught in the middle of the fray, the Commission's chief executive Trevor Phillips, is worth saving. And I say that even though he is a friend of Peter Mandelson.

In the columns of the Left-wing Guardian and Independent, not to mention on the metro-trendy airwaves of the BBC and Channel 4, Mr Phillips is being assailed almost daily.

It might have been a slow news week, but the attention paid to this story is amazing. What on earth has Trevor Phillips done to deserve such a mauling from Islington's stormtoopers?

Mr Phillips is being accused of 'poor leadership skills'. There is dark talk of loose stewardship of millions of pounds of public money. There are grumbles about his personal stake in an equality consultancy. In short, it is 'get Trevor' week.

Six of the Commission's 16 Commissioners (16 of them, all on fat deals!) have baled out, squawking about how 'unacceptable' it is that Mr Phillips has just been reappointed by Equalities Minister Harriet Harman.

Her husband Jack Dromey is an old friend of Mr Phillips.

The Left, infuriated, is out to topple him. When you see Lefties fighting, you do slightly wonder how on earth anyone could have called the Tories the 'nasty party'. This lot make the Borgias look wimpy.

Why should those of us on the Right be concerned? The Commission, after all, is an umbrella group for subsidised special interests. Why should we side with a suave Labour schmoozer who has plainly not kept as keen an eye as he might on an annual budget of more than £70 million?

Well, Trevor Phillips is something of a hero. This sometime Left-wing firebrand has realised that his party got certain things badly wrong in the past three decades.

You will seldom hear the BBC admit this, but his chief crime, as far as the Left is concerned, was to declare that multiculturalism was undesirable.

He also said that the Metropolitan Police of London could no longer accurately be called institutionally racist. Those pronouncements took courage. He is now paying the price.

For the head of the equalities world to disown multiculturalism was like the Archbishop of Canterbury disowning God. Mr Phillips denounced the very belief on which much of the equalities industry depended. So who is Trevor Phillips?

He was born in London and educated partly in Guyana, partly in Britain. He is proud of his Afro-Caribbean heritage - indeed, he and his brother Mike made a film documentary about the slave trade - but he is not obsessed with it. That sets him apart from many in the equalities game.

For such professional egalitarians, loyalty to minority is as important as loyalty to old school tie once was for pukka Englishmen. From one's minority springs one's political power. Ergo, salute the minority interest at every turn.

Mr Phillips takes a more modern view. He thinks that we all, whatever our minority (if we have one), belong to a wider community, the British nation. Sometimes loyalty to national interest trumps loyalty to one's home-team minority.

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