In the fallout from Guido’s revelations around the PM’s lockdown Tier-4 voice coach visit, pollster More in Common has done some research on how much the public buys Labour’s lines. It’s not pretty…
A large 65% of Brits say Leonie Mellinger was not a key worker (spin Labour took up then quickly abandoned) – only 12% say she was. Even 51% of Labour voters think she couldn’t be interpreted as a key worker…
A whopping 67% say the meeting was hypocritical considering Starmer’s constant attacks against Boris for guidance infractions. Similarly 68% of Brits say the meeting warrants an apology from the PM – only 16% say it doesn’t. That’s across the political divide with 54% of Labour voters and 64% non-voters saying the same thing. One thing the public can be relied on is an extremely dim view of this kind of hypocrisy…
Number 10 roped Rachel Reeves into the #VoiceCoachGate scandal today, with Starmer’s spokesman confirming she was part of the “core team” that met with him and his voice coach to “work at speed” on a Brexit deal statement. A reminder that Starmer refused to say whether he adhered to all Covid rules during this lockdown meeting at PMQs today…
Five days after the voice coach meeting, a member of Reeves’ household tested positive for Covid, aligning with the virus’ typical incubation period at the time. On 29 December 2020, Reeves tweeted:
“On Monday, a member of my household tested positive for Covid. Thankfully they are doing okay… I am not showing symptoms, but will now be working from home, including closing the Parliamentary debate on the UK’s trade deal with the EU. Please keep safe & follow public health advice.”
It’s exactly why in person meetings were being discouraged, most loudly by Labour politicians themselves…
- Was the meeting actually a social call rather than a work event? His voice coach was a long-standing family friend…
- If so, was any alcohol consumed during the voice training session?
- If Mellinger was present for work purposes only, how can it be that she was not employed by Labour until the following month (January 2021)?
- Does any invoice or evidence of payment exist for the delivery of the in person voice training session?
- Given that NHS voice therapists were working remotely at the time – and Mellinger promoted her own remote practice – why was the in person meeting necessary?
- Why has Labour now dropped its initial explanation that Mellinger was a ‘key worker’?
- Who was her line manager? Did she have a contract of any kind at the time?
As co-conspirators will recall, few politicians made more noise about ‘taking Covid seriously’ in 2020 than Keir Starmer. He was one of the loudest voices calling for harsher restrictions than tiered lockdowns in December 2020. That same month, his office invited around 40 Labour advisers to a Christmas party, only to cancel it on December 15th London was placed under Tier 3 restrictions. Yet, despite this supposed caution, Starmer still saw fit to meet his vocal coach, Leonie Mellinger, in person on Christmas Eve—when London was under even stricter Tier 4 rules…
Earlier 0n December 5th 2020, Starmer was forced to self-isolate for 10 days after a staffer in his private office tested positive for Covid. Just eight days after his isolations period was over, he was sitting down for an in-person coaching session. Why did this meeting go ahead when he was cancelling other events due to elevated restrictions? Especially when he’d previously been happy to meet his voice coach online…
Starmer’s Covid voice coach scandal has hit the BBC’s Politics Live programme today. Jo Coburn asks if Starmer’s denial that rules were broken draws a line under the affair. Labour’s Mike Tapp MP was batting for the defence:
“Well of course the opposition is going to jump on this bandwagon and sling the mud but he’s been really clear: He had to make a speech – I think it was on the the 20th – because of a Brexit announcement he has a small team around him. They prepared for it the day before.”
The date is wrong, the explanation is wrong. As detailed in Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s book, Mellinger visited Labour HQ on Christmas Eve and returned home afterwards. Tory Wendy Morton said “we need a proper investigation to get to the bottom of this.” The sort of fact-finding exercise Starmer might have been calling for if the shoe was on the other foot…
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?
Sarah Pochin at Reform Scotland’s manifesto launch event: “I really wanted to come on in a Reform tartan burka, but apparently I wasn’t allowed… One day let’s do one of these events not live-streamed. We’ll do all the naughty stuff…”
