The news that the Prime Minister Keir Starmer – the adenoidal android – has employed a voice coach is simply astonishing. ‘I’ll take no lectures from the party opposite,’ is one of Starmer’s most well-worn sentences. At least now we know who he will take lectures from: actress Leonie Mellinger, star of The Winters Tale and the BBC’s Bergerac, who has been helping Starmer find his voice. “The transformation,” she says, “has been enormous.” Really? Even after receiving years of tuition from the classically-trained actress, Starmer’s droning voice still send me to sleep.
Starmer seems to see the rules as things for lesser mortals to follow, but for a smartypants like him to cleverly work around
Mellinger started working with Starmer in 2017, when he was shadow Brexit secretary, and their work together continued through the pandemic. The future prime minister considered Mellinger to be so important that she qualified as a “key worker” in 2020, visiting Labour headquarters in a mask on Christmas Eve in 2020 to advise Starmer.
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