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.
During that time when Boris Johnson was prime minister, Starmer acted as something of a witchfinder-general, rooting out breaches of the covid rules. He was constantly calling for Johnson and Rishi Sunak to resign. It’s worth asking whether Starmer thinks the rules applied to him, too. Either way, let us stop to enjoy the mental image of Starmer repeating that he’s merely the pheasant plucker’s mate, and that on the slitted sheet he sits.
If Starmer did break lockdown rules, one thing is clear: it wasn’t worth it. We could pause here to list the many soundalikes of those now familiar grating Starmer tones. There’s Miss Othmar from the Peanuts TV specials; a Dalek when it finds out that the Doc-tor has es-caped; the child of George and Zippy; a Speak & Spell with its battery running down; a mortally injured cassowary. Starmer’s forced laughter at Prime Minister’s Questions brings back the metallic mirth of the Smash Martians when they discover that we pitiful humans peel potatoes with our metal knives.
At its heart, the Starmer voice strikes a chord because it’s very close to the traditional ‘nerd’ voice of British comedy. It’s hard to identify the patient zero progenitor of that tradition. There’s Harry Enfield’s ‘only me/you don’t want to do that’ character. Further back, we can point to Peter Cook’s EL Wisty, or Michael Palin’s Reg Pither from Monty Python: ‘thank you again for the excellent banana and cheese delicacy’. Richard Briers performed many variations, from Custard the Cat to Martin of Ever Decreasing Circles. This nerd voice is in our national bloodstream, almost always used to signify pettifogging, carping, unwanted advice. John Major was an earlier political sufferer of the phenomenon; ‘cones hotline,’ the telephone number introduced by the beleaguered PM in 1992, was meant to be said in that tone.
But if Mellinger at least is wowed by Keir’s transformation, the question arises: what did he sound like before? We can check by loading up old footage. Here we get a surprise. This is Starmer in 1994, aged 32:
Our future leader already has that familiar glassy demeanour, but he sounds (comparatively) positively normal. So where, and when, did he acquire that pronounced chunter on consonant-heavy words?
In the clip above, he is talking about removing the splendour and majesty of the law courts, making them places where ‘an ordinary person feels they can go…much more like a GP’s health centre’. What an ambition! I’m reminded of the character described in Breakfast At Tiffany’s: ‘Her flat eyes…only turned toward the stars to estimate their chemical tonnage’.
The rules bend around Starmer like laser light around an exotic dancer
This mission makes it clear that Starmer, and Starmerism, is about procedure, form and forms; it’s about the law, not as something special, grand and separate from the flow of life, but as a process that infects and infests every waking moment. We are back in the very English world of wardens and jobsworths and chits and dockets and stamps and inspections, and – that horrible modern word – compliance.
That love of tedious procedure solidified around Starmer. His voice changed to fit, subconsciously, around that world view; altering itself along the lines of the stereotype.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch appears to have spotted this Starmer obsession with procedure and doing things by the book. She has discovered that the perfect way to needle Starmer at PMQs is to imply that he hasn’t followed procedure in some way. It’ll be a delight on Wednesday to see how Starmer responds to her questioning him on whether it was right for a voice coach to be defined as a key worker during the pandemic. To my mind, it smacks of hypocrisy. Then again, this should hardly come as a surprise: Starmer seems to see the rules as things for lesser mortals to follow, but for a smartypants like him to cleverly work around.
As the writer Alex Dale said on X: ‘No he’s not lying, but only because he genuinely sees himself and his class as being beyond the old fashioned categories of truth and lies. He does what he wants first and then makes it true afterwards.’ It was this kind of thinking that led Starmer to think it was OK to accept freebies to go to football games, and get thousands of pounds of clothes paid for by a nice generous Labour donor.
At yesterday’s lobby briefing for Westminster journalists, Starmer’s spokesman refused to comment when pressed on whether the Labour leader had breached legally-binding measures during the pandemic, saying that he ‘wouldn’t get involved in matters relating to his time in opposition.’
The rules bend around Starmer like laser light around an exotic dancer. None of this would matter if he was any good. But he isn’t. When Starmer eventually comes undone, you’ll see him sinking into the quicksand still blithering away, ‘The correct procedure was followed at all times glug glug glug’. But at least his voice will impress his coach.
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