Outspoken, clever, brave and possessing great strategic nous – Trevor Phillips should have been a brilliant leader of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. So what on earth went wrong?

The idea of celebrity may not always mean much to a celebrity but there is a hierarchy to these things, and so it is that one of Trevor Phillips’s prized possessions is a photograph of himself in the company of Nelson Mandela. But it isn’t often that Phillips finds himself obliged to defer to anybody. He has status, a huge public profile and, in Lord Mandelson as well as many of the titans of New Labour, some very important allies.

A year ago, this might have been enough to guarantee his place in the governing establishment, with the agreeable side-products of wealth and reputation. Instead, with the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) that he runs hovering close to meltdown, his reputation is under the severest attack and his career is in crisis.

Phillips presumably has the support of government, which chose to extend his contract to run the organisation for another three years when a cross-section of his commissioners were calling for his head, but he cannot even be sure of that because, as the storm has raged, ministers have stayed silent.

Sir Ian Blair, the former Met commissioner, thought that he had the security of a five-year contract but now he sits at home, writing his memoirs. These contracts are not iron-clad. With headlines depicting only turmoil, nothing can be taken for granted.

The commissioners who say they have resigned (in fact, they have chosen not to re-apply; only Phillips and his deputy Margaret Prosser had their contracts renewed) are brutally specific about the problem they see at the EHRC. Nothing to do with the scale of the task. Nothing to do with teething. Phillips, they say, is the problem. His outspokenness in comments such as, “In truth, Obama may be helping to postpone the arrival of a post-racial America and I think he knows it”; his declaration that multiculturalism is dead, that it’s time to stop branding the police as institutionally racist – comments that many say they disagree with, pronouncements they never endorsed.

Kay Hampton, one of the first commissioners to bail out and a former chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, diagnosed it thus. “Phillips’s leadership style, which is better suited to a political party than a human rights organisation, led to deep discontentment and dissatisfaction. Not surprisingly, cracks soon appeared on the commission’s board, leading to a breakdown in trust and confidence in the chair.” Bert Massie, a disability rights campaigner, also said the problem stemmed from Phillips himself. “How do you manage to alienate that number of people? It’s quite a skill.”

Stepping down at the weekend, Ben Summerskill, head of the gay rights organisation Stonewall, went further. “Trevor is a brilliant communicator, he’s a fantastic maker of television programmes, but he has not been successful in running the commission and bringing it together. We should be crystal- clear: this isn’t an issue about policies, this isn’t an issue about whether the commission should be a modern, 21st-century commission, it’s an issue about old-fashioned management.”

So far, six members of the commission’s 16-strong ruling body say they have resigned, as well as the head of its disability committee, the director of stakeholder relations and, at the weekend, his director of communications. Greg Dyke, who knows Phillips well, having watched him rise from researcher to head of current affairs at London Weekend Television, said his friend is an able administrator. “He is clever and thoughtful and rational. He has always seemed very good with people. He was liked and popular. If people now are saying that he is autocratic, I have to say that is not something I ever noticed. But he does try to get things done. In some organisations, that doesn’t always make you very popular.”

A colleague who worked very closely with Phillips during his spell in 2000 as chairman of the Greater London Authority concurs. “He was very comfortable in the role, very courageous and he took the initiative. He was always wanting to move the thing forward. Others were hemmed in by the legislation, but he would say: we are a new organisation. Let’s try this. See where it goes.”

So if the problem is not a lack of ability, and Phillips hasn’t been daunted by the scale of his role as first chair of the Equalities Commission, what has gone wrong and how can it be fixed? One pertinent question is: was it the concept of the commission itself? Certainly Phillips was one of those who voiced strong opposition to the creation of the commission at the outset, arguing that the race agenda, for which he bore responsibility at the Commission for Racial Equality, would be lost or at least blanded out by the body’s absorption into the new super-quango, merging the separate government-funded bodies that dealt with race and gender and disabilities. Initially, he backed away from any suggestion that he might run it. Effectively his arm was twisted by ministers. His U-turn lost him considerable support among black activists who felt his involvement in the campaign against the EHRC might have helped them win the argument.

Dyke thinks there is a philosophical and structural problem. “When I saw they were putting all those organisations together, I thought, there is the recipe for a nightmare. Some jobs are beyond management.”

For all that, no one has suggested any lack of commitment on the part of Phillips towards the super-quango or the all-encompassing human rights agenda. Perhaps the problems go deeper.

Phillips travelled into the political arena on the path labelled New Labour. It was a particularly uncluttered path. He declined to be the Labour party’s candidate for London mayor, choosing instead to be Frank Dobson’s deputy. When Dobson lost to Ken Livingstone, Phillips entered the London Assembly by dint of his position at the top of the Labour list for elections run using proportional representation. It was a no-sweat entree to representative politics. It didn’t have to be that way. When it became clear that Bernie Grant, then MP for Tottenham, was ailing in the years before his death in 2000, many saw Phillips as a natural heir. But, not wanting the drudge of constituency meetings, backbenches and the loss of privacy, he chose not to subject himself to the hurly burly of a byelection.

He didn’t have to. From the chairmanship of the London Assembly to the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, he attained high-profile jobs – all within his capabilities but, crucially, all with the blessing of the New Labour establishment. New Labour was never comfortable with a race agenda, but in time he became its most tangible symbol that black people could thrive within the Blairite project. But they had to be black people who understood the vocabulary. He understood the vocabulary.

One can’t help thinking that if the complaints from commissioners are even half true, Phillips seems to have run the EHRC in a very New Labour, Blairite way – with a certainty of conviction and strength of purpose, but with no great feeling that he had to take his lieutenants with him. Commissioners complain of key statements and policy pronouncements of which they had no advance warning, and felt uneasy about some of his public positions, such as the observation he made in 2005 that Britain was “sleepwalking its way to segregation”. They hit out at deals allegedly struck without their knowledge, of government by clique.

Hampton complained that Phillips’s approach was too political, but in fact it has not been at all political in any operational sense because politicians know only too well that they need to keep potentially troublesome elements “on-side” to prevent the sort of disunity and plotting that has brought Phillips’s career to the precipice. A good politician nurtures constituents, even when they are foolish or boring, and they know that while powerful friends are a boon, a personal constituency is crucial, especially when things go bad.

Rather than political, his approach thus far would appear to have been rooted in the skills that made him a formidable journalist. Single-mindness, strategic nous, a love of impact, the courage to take the debate into uncharted territory, a certain ruthlessness. “There are two schools of thought in government and public affairs,” says a colleague who has observed him closely. “The first way says you build alliances and go slowly. The second is that you need to push ahead and let anyone who lags behind catch up. He is much closer to the second.”

This approach has brought some success, but no one writes much about that. The commission has brought 330 enforcement and litigation actions in the last 18 months alone. But was it the right approach to fuse the disparate elements of the fledgling commission? The only thing that unites the rebel factions now is their criticism of him.

If he is to survive – and increasingly even friends question whether he will – the next week will be crucial. The resignations are losing their impact, but it must be worrying for him that few of the commissioners who have been so scathing about him are themselves being criticised. By attacking him, they seem to be doing the will of their own constituents. His allies, by contrast, appear to be keeping their heads down and so are ministers who hold his fate within their gift. One more push and he could topple over. Any fresh allegation of conflict between his work for the commission – a three-day-a-week contract – and his private race consultancy Equate would see an end to him. (Commissioners and ministers were aggrieved to learn that in 2007, as Channel 4 faced criticism over racist remarks directed towards the Indian actor Shilpa Shetty on Big Brother, the station was being advised by Equate, which is 70% owned by Phillips.) Any new worries about the EHRC’s finances, which triggered concern this year from the National Audit Office, could also see him finished. Sudden death.

But if he can soldier on through the next few days, the plan is for a fresh start. A new, coherent vision for the commission, drawn up with greenskin commissioners who will pull in the same direction. Perhaps a landmark speech. Maybe it will activate a legal challenge or two; get its hands dirty. But there will also have to be a new approach from Phillips. A more measured, consensual approach that includes his lieutenants, and might well appeal on some days to the Tories and the Daily Mail, but doesn’t leave everyone else with the impression that the pendulum is stuck in an illiberal direction.

Above all, he will need to start showing an increasingly sceptical public why the commission, with its £70m budget, exists and should continue to exist. Already there is the fear that the ongoing crisis will give an incoming Cameron government the perfect excuse to kill off the commission. It needs a reputation for effectiveness, not cabaret. It needs results. “So far, he can’t point to anything substantial that it has done for anybody,” says the MP Diane Abbott. “There has been a lot of damage done to Trevor and the commission. The sooner it starts delivering for people, the better.”