Corbyn’s married Marxist spin doctor canoodles with blonde . . . while drinking a pink cocktail
This has set tongues wagging in Westminster. Jeremy Corbyn’s spin doctor seumas Milne — the 59-year-old political aide who is married to italian former advertising director Cristina Montanari, 60 — has been photographed at a hotel bar with a mystery blonde who appears to be in her early 30s.
At one stage, she had her head nestled into his shoulder in what can only be described as an intimate tete-a-tete.
At least the former Guardian journalist kept to his true political colours when it came to his choice of alcoholic beverage.
‘he was drinking a pink cocktail,’ said an onlooker.
The couple then headed back inside the Courthouse hotel in shoreditch, East London, where rooms cost £300 a night.
how apposite that the bar’s signature pink cocktail is called Confessions on the Roof and includes ‘passion syrup’.
A glamorous lawyer was identified yesterday as the possible mystery blonde. she declined to comment.
As if public-school educated Milne didn’t have enough enemies in Westminster, his latest antics will only lend them more ammunition. Former Labour MP simon Danczuk, who was deselected after sending lewd text messages to a 17-year-old blonde, wasted no time in rubbing Milne’s toffee nose in it.
‘i was under the impression that dating younger women wasn’t permitted in Corbyn’s morally pure Labour Party,’ he tweeted, adding a link to one of the photographs.
‘But for those at the top of the party machine it seems it’s fine to have a colourful love life — just as long as it’s conducted in secret.’
Milne may not be morally pure, but he is an unalloyed product of privilege. A former public schoolboy at £38,000-a-year Winchester College, he went on to read philosophy, politics and economics at Balliol College, Oxford, and economics at Birkbeck College, London, before joining the communist political magazine straight Left and, later, The Guardian.
On the death of his father, former BBC director-general Alasdair Milne, the Marxist-sympathising seumas inherited one-third of his £3.9 million estate.
he is also reportedly being paid £97,000 per year by the Labour Party, which is much more than the women in Corbyn’s inner circle, despite Labour’s commitment to equal pay.
‘he wears very singular dark suits, thin ties and proper shoes.’ says an observer. ‘he doesn’t dress like a Corbynista, he dresses like a Wykehamist [as former pupils of Winchester are known]. ‘he’s a cool dude. he is a marvellously intense fellow, hard to satisfy — at least on an intellectual level.’
in the days before Milne wore a suit, friends say his italian wife liked him to dress in white chinos and a black polo-neck ‘like The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’, and he was a regular at The Groucho Club in the Nineties.
AT UNivERsiTy, he had an enviable reputation as a ladies’ man. however, he seldom let passion get in the way of his Marxist politics. ‘One girlfriend said she felt he was intent on destroying the Labour Party,’ says a source.
Milne wed in 1992 and lives in a £2 million house in Richmond, south-West London (bought without a mortgage).
he and his wife managed to avoid sending their children to the local comprehensive and instead packed them off to grammar schools. Not any old grammar schools, either, but two of the top selective state schools in the country.
This has not stopped Labour — whose policy Milne shapes — from campaigning against Conservative proposals to introduce more grammars. What’s more, Montanari has offered her services as a private tutor, coaching children for selective schools from her home.
Milne even has enemies among his old newspaper colleagues. Guardian columnist suzanne Moore described him as ‘c*** central’, adding: ‘i f ****** hate these public school Leftists.’
however, one admirer who has stood by him is Guardian editor Katharine viner.
in October 2015, Milne was appointed as Labour’s executive director of strategy and communications. in a highly irregular move, he was granted a sabbatical by viner to go off and work for the Labour Party.
insiders say the pair have been close for years, with Milne even canvassing staff on her behalf during her successful bid to succeed Alan Rusbridger as editor. viner had seemingly repaid the favour, allowing her old ally to go ‘on leave’. he only left The Guardian permanently in January.
Milne’s latest alleged amorous antics follow a long and distinguished Leftist tradition.
‘One wonders whether Milne is aiming to emulate his hero, vladimir ilyich Lenin, who lived not far from shoreditch for two years,’ says victor sebestyen, author of best-selling Lenin The Dictator: An intimate Portrait. ‘For a decade Lenin carried on a
menage a trois with his wife and a glamorous, blonde, curly-haired, half-French mistress called inessa Armand. he told her once that she gave him the strength to start the revolution in Russia exactly 100 years ago — and look what a success he made of that.
‘Lots of the old Leninist revolutionaries had rather louche private lives.’