Unlike her most famous client Sir Keir Starmer, voice coach Leonie Mellinger knows exactly how to deliver a punchline.
As a jobbing young actress in the late 1980s, she once landed a walk-on role in TV sitcom The New Statesman, playing a randy toff named Clarissa who seduces sleazy Tory MP Alan B’stard (played by the late Rik Mayall).
Grabbing him by the unmentionables, Mellinger flutters her eyelashes before declaring (with exquisite comic timing): ‘Let’s see this huge majority I’m always hearing about.’
Her more recent venture into politics was, on paper, considerably less risque. Yet it has, nonetheless, spawned a hugely entertaining scandal.
It began last Sunday, when a new book on Sir Keir and the Labour Party revealed that Mellinger had spent around four years working closely with our current Prime Minister.
The hitherto-secret role did not, so far as we know, involve discussing his ‘huge majority’. Instead, the 65-year-old former actress worked as what she has variously described as his ‘personal presentation consultant’ and ‘impact coach’.
The book, Get In, suggests that the PM, who is 62, regarded Mellinger as a crucial member of his inner circle.
In an interview with authors Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, she claimed to have even been afforded ‘key worker’ status at the height of the Covid pandemic.
‘Voice coach’ Leonie Mellinger, 65, visited the Prime Minister during Tier 4 lockdown restrictions and spent around four years working closely with him
Mellinger told how she was, therefore, able to visit Labour HQ on Christmas Eve 2020 to help prepare Sir Keir for an 11-minute press briefing in which he would outline his response to Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal.
And therein lies a colourful row. For, while Mellinger says she wore a face mask throughout proceedings, it’s unclear exactly how that meeting could be reconciled with the strict lockdown rules then in force.
At the time of her trip, London was under draconian ‘Tier 4’ restrictions amid a mounting wave of Covid infections that would lead to tens of thousands of deaths.
Rules governing normal folk not only banned them from going anywhere near the workplace but also from socialising with friends and extended family during the festive season.
Exemptions were indeed being granted for key workers, as Mellinger says. But the list of occupations that qualified for this status (in government, at least) was limited to ‘occupations essential to the effective delivery of the Covid-19 response [and] essential public services’. It did not include ‘voice coaches’.
In fact, the list of exempt professions published at the time did not even include the speech or language therapists who help children with the most challenging needs.
Furthermore, official rules that the rest of us had to live by, also stipulated that ‘residents in Tiers 1 to 3 should not enter Tier 4 areas’. Yet Mellinger chose to travel to Westminster from her £1.2 million house near the seafront in Brighton, which was then in Tier 3.
Later that night, in fact, she posted a picture on X (then Twitter) of herself travelling back on an empty train, saying that she was ‘going home’.
These simple facts have, perhaps understandably, sparked an almighty hoo-hah, with the Tories accusing Starmer of flagrant hypocrisy.
For one thing, in Opposition, Starmer had repeatedly campaigned for lockdown restrictions to be ratcheted up still further. A few days after Mellinger’s train journey to London, he accused the Tories of failing to take the pandemic seriously, calling for a full national lockdown – including schools.
For another, he devoted boundless energy to criticising Boris Johnson for failing to abide by the exact letter of the law with regard to the so-called ‘Partygate’ scandal.
‘The British people do not like being taking for granted, and they do not like being taken for fools,’ was how Starmer put things in a typically holier-than-thou speech delivered back in 2022. ‘A government which refuses to follow the rules it sets for the rest of us loses the moral right to set those rules.’
Now it is Starmer who stands accused of failing to follow rules that were set for the rest of us. And his response to such claims has been gloriously muddled.
When the story of Mellinger’s visit to Labour HQ first broke, Downing Street attempted to ignore it by refusing to comment on the grounds that it involved events that pre-dated Starmer’s election victory.
That held for about 24 hours. Then, on Monday, Starmer was cornered by reporters before a dinner with EU leaders and asked whether or not voice coaches met the definition of a ‘key worker’.
Now it is Starmer who stands accused of playing fast and loose with lockdown rules, while the Tories he piously criticised are the ones baying for blood, writes Guy Adams
He refused to answer that question directly, but somewhat angrily insisted that ‘all rules were followed’.
In support of this line, Labour then briefed reporters that Mellinger’s visit could be justified via a technicality. Lockdown rules had specified that ‘everyone must work from home unless they are unable to do so,’ the party claimed, before insisting that it would have been impossible for Mellinger to assist Starmer properly if she couldn’t meet him face-to-face.
That second excuse was quickly undermined, however, when it emerged that Mellinger was perfectly well used to meeting clients remotely. She had posted endless pictures of herself working from home during the pandemic, claiming that she could effectively tutor clients via ‘virtual and online’ meetings and could ‘offer coaching sessions via video-conferencing’.
By Wednesday, Labour had once again changed tack. The party conceded that Mellinger had not actually been a key worker (meaning that the initial excuse was invalid) but instead insisted that the Christmas Eve visit was perfectly legal because, in the words of the PM’s press secretary, ‘she was a core part of a small team’ who needed to meet face-to-face.
It’s an argument that seems unlikely to be tested in court: police have declined to investigate the affair because laws governing the breaking of lockdown rules require prosecutions to occur within three years of the alleged offence taking place.
But the scandal continues to bubble away. On Thursday, the affair was linked not just to a breach of the law but to two specific outbreaks of Covid.
One involved Rachel Reeves, who also attended Mellinger’s disputed coaching session and had, just before the New Year, tweeted that ‘a member of my household tested positive for Covid. Thankfully, they are doing OK.’
The other concerned Mellinger’s 102-year-old mother, Renee, who fell ill that January having spent Christmas Day in her daughter’s company.
There also remain several unanswered questions about the exact nature of Mellinger’s role in Sir Keir’s team and the dates it covered.
Labour claims Mellinger was a paid employee, meaning that she’s entitled to claim to have attended the meeting for ‘work purposes’.
But her account on the social network LinkedIn claims she only began officially working for the party in 2021, after the disputed episode took place.
A very different timeline was offered when Mellinger was interviewed by the authors of Get In.
Then, she claimed to have first been asked to meet Starmer following the 2017 party conference in Brighton when he gave what she regarded as a ‘wooden’ speech.
‘That was the beginning of our relationship,’ she told the author, and alleged that the role continued until at least 2021, when she coached him for a TV interview with Piers Morgan that saw Starmer weep at the memory of his mother’s death.
Oddly, however, there is evidence that Mellinger’s relationship with Starmer goes back a great deal further.
For the PM is a longstanding acquaintance of her lawyer husband, Anthony Burton, 77, who is a partner at Simons Muirhead Burton, a firm of solicitors which specialises in civil liberties, music and criminal law and has represented the likes of Holly Willoughby, England cricket captain Ben Stokes and musician Noel Gallagher.
In 2005, the PM and Burton co-founded the Death Penalty Project, which lobbies against capital punishment and receives funding from the Foreign Office.
Mellinger started out as an actress and once landed a walk-on role in TV sitcom The New Statesman, playing a randy toff named Clarissa who seduces sleazy Tory MP Alan B’stard (played by the late Rik Mayall)
And back in 2011, Leonie Mellinger used Twitter to praise a ‘brilliant speech by Keir Starmer’ at one of the Project’s events.
Now, of course, she appears to be claiming that ‘the beginning of our relationship’ came in 2017. It seems, at best, a clumsy choice of words.
The relationship of her husband’s firm, Simons Muirhead Burton, with Starmer has also been dragged into the spotlight.
The solicitors paid him £18,000 for ‘legal advice’ between 2016 and 2019, when he was not only an MP but also a shadow minister.
The going rate they paid him varied from £300 to more than £500 per hour. They also gave him a donation of £5,000 in 2017.
It’s unclear what role Anthony Burton, who chairs the board of London’s progressive Royal Court Theatre, played in those transactions. Adding a note of comedy to this week’s political dispute is Leonie Mellinger’s somewhat racy pedigree, which saw her feted as a minor celebrity during the 1980s thanks to her relationship with first husband Robin Askwith.
The late Askwith was an actor who gained notoriety in the downmarket 1973 film Confessions Of A Window Cleaner. It was followed by a series of other Confessions movies that were derided as soft porn by critics but brought a level of fame that left him, by his own reckoning, ‘up to my neck in crumpet’.
He met German-born Mellinger – who’d cut her teeth acting alongside Sir Patrick Stewart in Royal Shakespeare Company productions of Titus Andronicus and The Winter’s Tale – when they co-starred in a French 18th-century comedy called Infidelities alongside Christopher Biggins and Charlotte Rampling. The Daily Mirror described Leonie’s role as that of a ‘buxom wench’.
Talking about her relationship with Askwith, she told the Mirror’s gossip columnist: ‘I know our images are very different – but we make each other laugh.’
The couple tied the knot in 1988 at their holiday home on Gozo, an island adjacent to Malta where they were prominent members of the Maltese glitterati.
Leonie, who was almost a decade younger than her husband, told reporters, ‘I found Robin irresistible.’
Askwith seemed to agree. Asked by the Daily Mail’s then showbiz correspondent, Lester Middlehurst, to name the ‘most unusual place’ they’d made love, he declared: ‘In my boat, off the coast of Malta, waving to the Prime Minister, Dom Mintoff.’
Sadly, the union didn’t last. Mellinger and Askwith parted company in the early 1990s, and a few years later Mellinger married Burton, giving birth to their daughter Aurelie, who is now an actress.
The couple have since divided their time between their house in Brighton’s Kemptown and a £500,000 flat near Richmond Park, West London.
Motherhood limited Mellinger’s subsequent TV career and she pivoted into a more corporate role, helping executives prepare for speeches, presentations and job interviews.
Among the testimonials now found on her professional website is a note from Sir Keir which reads: ‘Thanks for all your help and support along the way which made this all possible.’
Her work for the Prime Minister turned Mellinger into a devoted fan. When he made his first speech as leader, in April 2020, she has recalled watching via ‘a phone on the mantelpiece’ as he spoke from his living room.
‘I’ve got a photo of myself at home with a glass of champagne, raising my arms in the air as I was so thrilled.’
Throughout lockdown, she used social media to sing her client’s praises with Pravda-like devotion.
‘The Tories are struggling to find a way to make Keir Starmer look bad,’ she said in July 2020. ‘After Boris’s entitled imposter routine, Keir shows he’s the real deal,’ she added soon afterwards.
On the occasion of his first press conference as Prime Minister, Mellinger told followers he was ‘looking and sounding like a leader, comfortable in his skin, answering every question head on with conviction and substance #leadership’.
In the wake of this week’s events, some of the uncritical posts she has shared in recent times seem gloriously ill-judged.
When Boris Johnson received a fixed penalty notice linked to a ‘birthday party’ event held in the Cabinet room in June 2020, Mellinger, for example, shared a message on Twitter written by Sir Keir saying: ‘Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have broken the law and repeatedly lied to the British public. They must both resign.’
Three months earlier, she shared a post addressing the same topic which read: ‘The party is over, Boris Johnson. Resign.’
Now it is Starmer who stands accused of playing fast and loose with lockdown rules, while the Tories he piously criticised are the ones baying for blood.
Like any half-decent actor, Leonie Mellinger knows all about irony. Some might call this week’s developments the very definition of it.
And the longer this row drags on, the more it will surely threaten her famous political client’s ‘huge majority’.
