Our prime minister, it turns out, has had many years of voice coaching. Some of this work apparently happened during lockdown and may or may not have been in breach of the rules then in place. This has been the main talking point, which is a shame, because a far more interesting topic is voice coaching itself.
I’ve had a fair amount of stick about the way I speak, so I don’t feel good about disparaging anyone’s voice. I’ll put it like this: Starmer’s voice isn’t his greatest asset. I wonder what response his voice coach could have got upon telling someone that the way he spoke was down to her. Embarrassed silence? It prompts the question: how bad can his voice have been before?
The answer is, fascinatingly, not that bad at all. Listen to him seven or eight years ago. He may not have had a shot at playing Henry V for the Royal Shakespeare Company, but he sounded just fine – as close as most politicians get to coming across as natural and sincere. So why mess with that?
If Starmer’s present speaking voice is the answer, then what on earth was the question? It surely can’t have been: how can we make this plainly passionate and clever man sound mannered, stilted and a trifle insincere? There must be someone on his team who now listens to him speak, nods approvingly and says: “Yep, this is just how we want him sounding. Good job, everyone.”
What drives political advisers to mess around with something as fundamental as a person’s voice? It’s not like changing their hair or their clothes. It’s bigger than that – and much harder to pull off convincingly. Don’t tell me there was a focus group suggesting it would be better if he sounded like he does now.
Yes, we all know Margaret Thatcher was coached to lower her voice and this was a stroke of genius, blah blah. But she, too, sounded better as she was in the first place. She ended up sounding plain weird. It may be that her electoral success came despite that, rather than because of it.
• Adrian Chiles is a writer, broadcaster and Guardian columnist
