Even the normally fair and amusing Guardian columnist Simon Hoggart, a former colleague of Phillips, having poked some gentle fun at the fact that you can buy all sorts of branded goods (T-shirts, mugs and so on) from EM's website, concluded: "When people move from one extreme set of views to embrace another equally batty picture of the world, they expect us to applaud their choice, as if the fact that they have rejected one form of nuttiness somehow validates the screwball views they hold now." 

What the secularist Guardianistas completely fail to understand is the influence of Phillips's Jewish heritage on her political journey. In her memoir she describes her shock at the outbreak of anti-Israel feeling at the Guardian over the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which came as the Falklands war reached its climax. At the time she had never even visited Israel and had little interest in the country. Yet a senior colleague stunned her by asking her: "What on earth are we going to say about your war?" 

"At that moment," she writes, "the iron entered my soul." There has since been no stauncher defender of Israel and traditional Jewish values; she and her husband, Standpoint columnist Joshua Rozenberg, now have a flat in Jerusalem in addition to their London home.

There has also been no more courageous figure in British journalism over the past two decades and more, standing up with coolness and dignity to boorish extremists in the audience at BBC TV's Question Time, the target of vicious, misogynistic and downright anti-Semitic online comments in the Guardian and the Independent, to their apparent indifference. Yet she remains vulnerable and emotional at heart: she records in Guardian Angel her distress at leaving the paper; when she was invited back last year to be interviewed for the latest history of the Guardian, she was surprised to be given a sympathetic hearing by the author, Ian Mayes. "When I left the Guardian building that day, I wept," she writes.