According to Leonie Mellinger’s own LinkedIn the actress took up employment as a “communications adviser” to the Labour Party in January 2021. This is subsequent to her visit to Victoria Street’s Labour HQ on Christmas Eve 2020. Labour’s claim by minister Catherine McKinnell is that “people were able to go to work and undertake really important roles and that was clearly a very important moment in Britain where an important public statement had to be made.” Karin Smyth repeats today on the morning round that “Keir was working at that time preparing for interviews… that was a working event.” Whether or not a voice coach could reasonably qualify as a “key worker,” it is unclear how Labour can claim the meeting was a LOTO-designated work event seeing as Mellinger was apparently not in the employ of the party during her visit. Mellinger is clearly a close family friend of Starmer’s, the wife of his friend Anthony Burton – with whom the PM founded and ran a prominent legal action charity for 15 years, and from whose legal firm he received payments while an MP…
Meanwhile leftie outriders like Doughty Street’s Adam Wagner – who gleefully piled onto every Tory under the sun during the pandemic – have set out Labour’s internal defence, letting slip that a ‘social’ gathering would ‘clearly breach the rules’:
“The only important question is whether the in-person voice coaching visit was “reasonably necessary … for the purposes of work” (to leave home) and that the gathering was “reasonably necessary… for work purposes. There is no suggestion (as far as I can tell) that the gathering was a social one. That would clearly breach the rules, as with the Downing Street Christmas parties. As a work gathering: it’s certainly arguable that the leader of the opposition would want a voice coach to be in person.”
Can a long-term family friend – apparently not employed by the party – visiting Starmer on Christmas Eve be anything other than a social call? On Christmas Eve, was any alcohol – or say, Christmas cake – consumed at any point during the visit?
Former leader of the SNP in Westminster Ian Blackford told Times Radio why he believes Nicola Sturgeon’s claim that she spent no time in the kitchen and therefore didn’t see any of her husband’s purchases:
“She doesn’t have a passion for cooking.”
