My brave new world

Do not adjust your set!

If you are looking for the diary on melaniephillips.com, you’ve come to the right place. It now has a new home. If you are a new reader of this blog — welcome, and I hope you enjoy it. I’ve posted below some of my last few entries to give you a flavour of what I write.

All new diary posts will now appear on this website, which you can access either by clicking on melaniephillips.com or by coming here to the Spectator. Established readers should find all the services that were provided on my old site; you can subscribe through the RSS feed, you can contact me at the email address on the masthead and, in a new addition, you will now be able to post your own comments below each entry. The archive of my previous diary entries will still be found on melaniephillips.com and that website — maintained by my incomparable webmaster Tom — will still be updated with articles I write for other publications as well as my talks and lectures.

So why have I made this move? I was delighted to have the opportunity because it allows me to continue to be myself while enjoying a number of advantages. First and foremost is the chance it provides to reach out to a yet wider readership. The Spectator is a highly respected political weekly which punches well above its weight, and its website has established itself very fast as a must-read on the net. It offers me a congenial home with which I am already familiar, since I write for the magazine itself from time to time and know how much it respects independence of mind.

And that of course is the most important thing for me. Some readers might be anxious that what I now write will be controlled or influenced in some way by the Spectator’s editorial line. That will not happen. What I write will not be seen in advance by the Spectator’s staff before it goes up here, and subject to the usual constraints of the laws of libel and contempt of court they will have no input into the content of this blog, even though they will be paying me a small stipend. I will continue to write as freely as before. It will be the same blog but in a different setting.

So I hope you enjoy these elegant new surroundings and will continue to accompany me as I embark on this fresh chapter of my adventures in cyberspace.