Lawyer puts a spin doctor in a spin of his own
Labour communications director spotted in clinch with Australian barrister 23 years his junior
AT FIRST glance, it appears an everyday story of an older man falling for a younger, pretty blonde woman.
The photographic evidence certainly seems to suggest that Seumas Milne, the 59-year-old Labour Party spin doctor, was enjoying an intimate romantic clinch with a 36-year-old human rights lawyer who, however, is not his wife.
Not so, said friends of Mr Milne, yesterday. Perhaps somewhat ungallantly, they insisted Mr Milne was “not a willing participant” in the encounter between the pair.
Mr Milne, Jeremy Corbyn’s director of communications, had not relished a moment of his embrace with Jennifer Robinson on the balcony of a hotel in East London.
“I know the pictures tell a different story,” said a source who is close to the events, “But I know there is nothing going on. I don’t think it’s a quick snog. There may have been a bit of nuzzling on her part but if you look at Seumas’s face, you can see that he is not a willing participant.”
Such news will be a welcome relief to Cristina Montanari, Mr Milne’s wife of the past 25 years. The couple, who live in a £2 million house in west London, have two grown up children together.
Ms Montanari, 60, was a former director of an advertising company who now, according to one website, works as a private tutor. Mr Milne is a former columnist for The Guardian, Marxist sympathiser and son of Alasdair Milne, the former BBC director general. He was educated at Winchester College.
His not-romantically-attached new friend is an Australian lawyer who is now practising as a barrister at Doughty Street chambers, where she is close friends of Amal Clooney, the wife of George Clooney, the Hollywood actor, and who attended the couple’s wedding in 2014.
Miss Robinson has previously represented Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who remains holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Mr Milne has also met Assange inside the embassy, raising suggestions that could be how the pair first met.
The photograph of them in a state of embrace was taken at the Courthouse Hotel in Shoreditch in a fashionable part of London. “They were very heavy hands on, full on heavy petting,” a witness told the Guido Fawkes political website. He was clearly mistaken.
Yesterday, Miss Robinson’s father jumped to her rescue. Terry Robinson, a horse trainer from New South Wales, dismissed suggestions she is having an affair with the married father-of-two.
He said: “I know my daughter pretty well. She’s probably just having a night
out and I think it’s more like a friendship than anything else. Especially if she’s had a few drinks.”
He added: “I think it’s just a storm in a teacup.” Miss Robinson, a Rhodes scholar who studied at Balliol College, Oxford, has regularly tweeted her praise of Mr Corbyn.
Last night, neither Mr Milne nor Miss Robinson were prepared to comment on the photographs. Mr Milne has previously been pictured shaking hands with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. It is not clear which of the two photographs – that with Mr Putin or with Miss Robinson – will prove the more embarrassing.