Downing Street has defended the voice coach who Sir Keir Starmer met in December 2020 as a “core part of a small team” working with him during the pandemic, as the Tories claimed she broke lockdown laws.
Communication skills specialist Leonie Mellinger is understood to have joined both the Prime Minister and Rachel Reeves to help him prepare for Covid-era statements and press conferences.
Number 10 would not be drawn on how many times they met or how many people were present, but said Sir Keir believed it was not reasonably possible for Ms Mellinger to carry out her job from home.
“She was a core part of a small team,” the Prime Minister’s press secretary told reporters on Wednesday.
Sir Keir hit back at opposition attacks about his meeting with Ms Mellinger at Prime Minister’s Questions, saying “I was working” while the Tories were “partying” at lockdown-busting gatherings in CCHQ and Downing Street.
“In December 2020, I was in my office working on the expected Brexit deal,” he said.
“With my team we had to analyse the deal as it came in at speed, prepare and deliver a live statement at speed on one of the most important issues for our country in recent years.
“That’s what I was doing. What were they doing?
“Suitcases of food into Downing Street, partying and fighting, vomiting up the walls, leaving the cleaner to remove red wine stains. That’s the difference – I was working, they were partying.”
In excerpts of Get In, a book about Sir Keir’s leadership being serialised by The Times newspapers, Ms Mellinger is described as having qualified for “key worker” status.
She also wore a face mask during the meeting at Labour Party headquarters on Christmas Eve in 2020, according to the book by political journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund.
But opposition critics have seized on the revelation as evidence of what they suggest amounts to a potential breach of lockdown rules, as London and the South East were under regional restrictions at the time.
The Tories heightened their attack on Wednesday, demanded a police investigation into whether laws were broken by Ms Mellinger.
A spokesman for Kemi Badenoch said: “The key question here is: is a voice coach a key worker who can travel from Tier 4 to Tier 3 during lockdown?
“It doesn’t matter if you’re part of a core team, that is the question. Now, Keir Starmer said that lawmakers can’t be lawbreakers. It is almost unimaginable to disagree that that was a clear breach of the Covid rules.”
Asked if Mrs Badenoch thought police should investigate, he said: “Yes, she does.”
He said he was accusing Leonie Mellinger of breaking the law, rather than Sir Keir, but claimed the comment about lawmakers not being lawbreakers applied to the Prime Minister “by proxy”.
Ms Mellinger has been approached for comment.
