Trouble in paradise for Mariella and Clooney?

BROADCASTER Mariella Frostrup remains so close to George Clooney after their lost weekend in Cannes in 1999 that her two children call him ‘Uncle George’. But her cosy friendship with the actor and wife Amal has been jeopardised by her husband Jason McCue’s sideline advising a despotic banana republic that human rights barrister Amal has called ‘a darker repression’.

For while husky-voiced Mariella, 54, enjoys £14,000-per-week scuba diving holidays at the ‘immaculate’ Four Seasons resort in the Maldives, human rights lawyer McCue has bigger fish to fry in the Indian Ocean archipelago.

I can reveal that his private advisory firm is following in Lord Mandelson’s greasy footsteps by providing PR services for the Maldives’ corrupt president Abdulla Yameen, whose regime has committed a string of human rights abuses.

Amal Clooney acts for Yameen’s exiled predecessor, Mohamed Nasheed, the nation’s first democratically elected president. When Cherie Blair’s law firm controversially advised Yameen in 2015, in return for £70,000 a month, Amal said it was ‘very sad’ that the wife of the former prime minister was ‘working against the people of the Maldives’. This week, McCue’s firm, Rigel Corporation, sent out a press release ‘on behalf of the President’s Office of the Maldives, in conjunction with the country’s Police Service.’

A spokesman for Nasheed calls the Maldives police ‘the jack-booted enforcers of President Yameen’s thuggish regime’. The spokesman adds: ‘We are horrified that Mr McCue, who calls himself a human rights lawyer, thinks it appropriate to earn money working as their spin-doctor.’ McCue says his firm’s engagements with ‘a range of government and corporate clients’ are ‘confidential’. The Maldives government, which quit the Commonwealth last year, stands accused of corruption and money laundering. Its opposition leaders are either in exile or in jail. In Who’s Who, McCue (pictured with Mariella) lists one of his interests as ‘fires’. Let’s hope he’s also good at putting them out — or else the invitations from George and Amal to holiday at Lake Como could quickly dry up.