With a new political memoir on the horizon, juicy snippets of scandal about Keir Starmer’s journey to No 10 are being slowly drip-fed to the press. This week’s brewing scandal centres on Leonie Mellinger, an actress turned voice coach who may have contravened lockdown rules to train up the future Prime Minister.
The story behind Mellinger and Keir’s working relationship is detailed in Get In, a soon-to-be published book on Starmer’s Labour from Times journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Macguire. It’s serialisation in their paper has already produced such zingers (from an unnamed source) as “[Keir] thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.”
Now Starmer has been left to fend off questions about whether he bent the rules to give his acting coach key worker status.
Mellinger, 65, is the daughter of Jewish refugees that fled Nazi Germany. A former actress, she trod the boards in productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and once shared a stage with Patrick Stewart.
She was married to actor Robin Askwith, who starred in raunchy Seventies soft-core pornography flick Confessions of a Window Cleaner. The couple divorced in 1991. She married Anthony Burton, a criminal defence lawyer, four years later. Burton reportedly co-founded the Death Penalty Project, a charity that campaigns against capital punishment, with Starmer.
The actress started her own “impact” coaching business two decades ago, training clients how to “perform yourself” in political and business scenarios. A testimonial from Starmer takes pride of place on her website: ”Thanks for all your help and support along the way which made all this possible.”
Mellinger has posted regularly in praise of Starmer on social media platform X, formerly Twitter. “Brilliant speech by Keir Starmer at launch of Death Penalty Project five year report,” she posted in 2011, before they started working together.
Starmer’s team officially recruited Mellinger in 2017 to help coach him on his public speaking. They worked together for five years until 2021. “The transformation has been enormous,” she said.
But when Starmer’s team first approached her to coach their hopeful future leader, Mellinger was reportedly less than impressed, describing his autocue reading skills as “somewhat wooden”.
Mellinger said she worked with the politician to help him “emotionally connect” with audiences while speaking in public or on camera by having “the courage to open up and reveal more of himself”.
In her role as coach, Mellinger said she was part of a “core team” around Starmer. “I would be there for every communication and rehearse him,” she said.
But Mellinger’s role in the leadership campaign has come under question. According to the timeline in the book, Mellinger visited Labour’s London headquarters on Christmas Eve 2020, while the capital was in Tier 4 lockdown regulations – where everyone was told to stay home. She said she was there to coach Starmer on responding to the Brexit deal.
Some sleuthing on Mellinger’s Instagram accounts suggest she travelled to and from her home in Brighton, which was in Tier 3. According to the pandemic lockdown rules, people should not have been travelling to Tier 4 from any other areas. Mellinger reportedly says in the book that her key worker status allowed her to make the trip within the rules.
Asked whether he had broken the rules at a press conference in Brussels today, the Prime Minister said “absolutely not” and “all rules were followed”.
