Spare a thought for Keir Starmer’s voice coach

The revelation that Keir Starmer may have broken lockdown regulations to meet a voice coach on Christmas Eve in 2020 has triggered two distinct flavours of reaction.

One is that the UK’s prime minister is a despicable hypocrite and should resign. This creature! This scoundrel! He’s the wretch who hounded Boris Johnson out of office for accepting a slice of extra-judicial birthday cake during lockdown, only to then be revealed to have indulged in an outrageous vanity project when those same Covid rules were in place.

The second, rather more sanguine response has been: ‘You mean, this is what Starmer sounds like after voice coaching?’

This was my instinctive reaction. But I did not entirely trust my own auditory memory. Perhaps his voice had been even worse, once upon a time. Incremental improvements can elude one until an ancient artefact emerges, like a Seventies ITV sitcom or a Blackberry Messenger, to show how far we’ve come. Thankfully, Ed Cumming has written a longer and more serious piece on the issue in the Telegraph, for which I’m very grateful, in which he suggests that Starmer has indeed shown an improvement over the years. Cumming generously includes some sound files to prove it. The first is of Starmer addressing a Labour conference in Brighton, as shadow Brexit secretary, in 2017. He sounds weedy, uninspired, flat. And then a more recent clip, one in which he addresses the nation as its premier, in the aftermath of the Southport murders and riots. Perhaps you’ll find it stirring. Churchillian, even. Lash yourself to the mast and give it a spin. Here it is…

I confess I am at a loss to distinguish the two. Both seem to me of a piece with Keats’s ‘wailful choir’ of small autumnal gnats, or the sort of pneumatic dental-drill voice that, if suitably amplified, could disperse a crowd of loitering teenagers from any shopping mall faster than a threat to wash under their arms. Only heard through several layers of silicon insulation wadding.

Ah well. Putting aside the ‘breach of lockdown’ issue, I actually applaud Starmer for at least trying. For his determination to confront his strangled, dampened and adenoidal disfigurement of the language of Shakespeare, Milton and the King James Bible. It’s a sign he has acknowledged not just a personal defect but also his responsibility to the nation.

Clear articulation, timbre, depth, resonance, tone… these are aspects of the politician’s art every bit as core as Teflon coating, plausibility and selective memory. They can reassure or alarm an electorate according to their abundance or deficit.

It has long been established – at the very least since George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, and since confirmed by The Science – that only a small sliver of communication comes from the actual words we use. Humans are still running pre-linguistic software in parallel with the more recent updates and pick up a lot from subliminal auditory signals.

Of course, there are noble precedents. Margaret Thatcher famously used Laurence Olivier’s voice coach, Kate Fleming, to soften and deepen her tone, and to slow her brisk trot to a solemn adagio. This was all prior to her premiership, but if you want to see an exemplary analysis of the changes, listen to Spitting Image impressionist Steve Nallon. Uncanny. Clearly Nallon should have been chosen over Meryl Streep for the Hollywood biopic.

By comparison, after several years with his no doubt blameless voice coach, Leonie Mellinger, Starmer’s reedy and highly compressed kazoo of a delivery remains emphatically unenriched. While his syntax and word choice have shown marginal improvement, in the Westminster tradition of oratory, he remains a moped among Harleys – only heard, never felt. Compared with the great parliamentarians of the past, or even other members of the managerial classes to whose rule we now seem eternally condemned, he cuts through with all the efficacy of a plasticine penknife.

One can overstate the importance of a speaking voice. There are good reasons, in fact, to distrust any MP who seems a little too in love with his own rhetorical gifts. Few would begrudge George Galloway’s pre-eminence in the field – nor doubt the ego and vanity that nestle and throb just below that powerful diaphragm, the self-regard that rolls his grandiloquent Rs, the wind-baggery into which he so easily topples, deafened by the sheer musicality of his own voice. Galloway’s gift is magnificent in its way, but it is a museum piece. It is as unavoidably theatrical as his fedora hat.

No, the most enviable voice now operating on the backbenches is surely that of Nigel Farage. His has a natural, chummy jocularity, the natural banter of the tavern. But the under-girding chuckle in Farage’s voice, never far from a gurgle of disbelief at the topsy-turvy world of freezing pensioners and warmly quartered refugees, belies a master of delivery and coiner of memorable phrases.

I can understand the appeal to Starmer of Ms Mellinger’s instruction. Her back story is remarkable, and very on point. Born in a British military hospital neighbouring Spandau Prison, her actor father was then working for the legendary Marxist playwright and poet, Bertolt Brecht. It was Brecht of course who penned the immortal satire, ‘The Solution’, which ends with the following:

‘The people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?’

A thought that has no doubt flickered across Starmer’s mind on occasion this past six months.

Furthermore, Mellinger was briefly married to Robin Askwith, who famously starred in the Confessions of a Window Cleaner sequence of 1970s sex farces, along with Tony Blair’s late father-in-law, Tony Booth. You can of course read too much into these things…

So Sir Keir, forget trying to be like Maggie or Tony, old son. If you want to sound like the voice of the people, wrap your listening gear around that Heineken ad from the 1980s. Repeat after me: ‘The water in Majorca don’t taste like what it ought to.’

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.