Anthony Gordon Lennox
Voice coach who brought authenticity to public figures from David Cameron to Monica Lewinsky
ANTHONY GORDON LENNOX, who has died aged 48, was usually described by the media as a “voice coach” or “image consultant” on account of the help that he gave with public speaking to high-profile figures such as David Cameron and the Duchess of Cambridge, whose word-perfect marriage vows owed not a little to his training.
Yet while he was the invisible hand who had shaped many a public moment, such descriptions did less than justice to the range of his advice and unconventionality of his methods. These were formed by his experience working on the television programme Question Time, where he had seen how pressure had made guests unable to communicate their thoughts effectively.
His approach was the antithesis of “spin”. He urged clients instead of assuming a persona to be more personal, to shed the carapace that they had often adopted to succeed and instead to reveal themselves as human and vulnerable. This greater authenticity, he felt, made an audience more trusting of what was said.
Naturally open himself, he would challenge clients’ thinking and, having deconstructed their identity, instil the confidence to find the best in themselves. His skills combined those of the father confessor, the intelligence officer handling a source, and the therapist; the whole was perhaps a form of sympathetic magic.
Through his company AGL, which he set up in 2004, he worked in particular with non-professional speakers, not politicians but chief executives of international businesses. He was always discreet about clients but these included companies such as Vodafone, HSBC and Universal Music. Many of those he advised came to see him as a mentor and friend.
Better known was his work before the Royal Wedding in 2011, when he organised a secret rehearsal in the Abbey at which just he, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the bride and groom were present. He also helped James Middleton, the Duchess’s brother, who was dyslexic, to practise his reading from the Bible. He did the same in 2013 for Amanda Thatcher, when in the public glare she had to read at her grandmother’s funeral.
It was not true, as rumoured, that he was asked to change Samantha Cameron’s well-bred elocution before the 2010 election, though he did advise her before her first television interview. And in 2005 he was consulted by her husband when he challenged for the Conservative leadership.
David Cameron was said to have been irked when Gordon Lennox told him that his speech needed to say more about why he wanted the job. The cameras had been left rolling during the exchange, however, and when Gordon Lennox showed him, with the sound off, how engaging with his emotions animated what he had to say, Cameron at once grasped the point.
His subsequent speech without notes at the Conservative conference won him the role and in 2007 Gordon Lennox was responsible for the address in which Cameron memorably declared: “It might be a bit messy, but it will be me.” Such crafted spontaneity was Gordon Lennox’s hallmark. Latterly, he had worked with Monica Lewinsky during her re-emergence into the spotlight. “Ant was a treasure map,” she said. “He would guide you to where you needed to go.”
Anthony Charles Gordon Lennox was born in Madrid on April 29 1969. The youngest of four, he and his three sisters were all born in different countries, as their father Lord Nicholas, the younger son of the 9th Duke of Richmond, was a career diplomat. Their mother Mary was a lady-in-waiting to Princess Alexandra.
Ant spent part of his childhood living in the gatehouse of the Paris embassy, imbibing from his parents ways of setting visiting dignitaries at their ease. Though he learnt Spanish when his father became ambassador in Madrid in 1984, he was no scholar and first time around failed to get into Eton. The Marquesa de la Cruz, wife of his father’s counterpart in London, promptly enlisted the prayers of a dozen elderly nuns and with their intervention he sailed through at the next attempt.
Popular at school, he would sometimes lampoon its institutions, using his talents as a mimic. On a night exercise with the Cadet Corps, boys were roused from their bivouacs in the early hours by what sounded like the orders of the master in charge, Barnaby Lenon (later head at Harrow). The culprit was never found.
After spending time with gauchos in Argentina, he went to Exeter University to read Politics. In the holidays, he worked as a researcher in the library at the Conservative Party’s Central Office, reporting to the young David Cameron (whose sister he knew).
Cameron gave him a reference when he then applied for a job as a runner on Question Time, which had just been put out to tender by the BBC. Again, connections eased his path – he had been a pageboy at the wedding of its new editor, Alexandra Henderson – but he soon demonstrated his ability to soothe the frayed nerves of guests appearing on the programme.
His understanding of the grammar of television led him to be consulted by the Tories and, having advised on presentation before the election defeat in 1997, he was recruited to William Hague’s leadership bid. It was Gordon Lennox who staged the successful campaign launch and, working closely with Sebastian Coe, in effect Hague’s chief-of-staff, over the next four years supervised media appearances as well as the party conference.
He was also at Hague’s side when he resigned in 2001; in an arena not noted for such virtues, Gordon Lennox was rare in being not just a loyal friend but also a conciliator, a skilled operator untainted by malice.
He later helped Iain Duncan Smith quietly to lose the “frog in his throat” of which he had complained when speaking, but by then he had co-founded his first business, the public relations firm TASC. Its first two clients were Jeffrey Archer, who wanted to be mayor of London, and General Pinochet, then under house arrest near Wentworth golf course.
Though always upbeat in public, Gordon Lennox was more complex in private. Much of his creative energy derived from a restlessness to understand himself, the outward expression of which was a somewhat dishevelled appearance and shambolic personal organisation; his office floor was regularly strewn with receipts from trips to see clients.
He had thought as a child of being an actor, and had appeared as an extra at Glyndebourne as well as in a minor part in a film directed by Julian Fellowes, From Time to Time (2009). In 2013, in front of a packed audience of friends, he put on three performances at the St James’s Theatre, London, of
I, Cinna, Tim Crouch’s monologue about the character mistakenly murdered by the mob in Julius Caesar.
Perhaps just as bravely, he had latterly taken up riding again, and for a re-enactment had for a day been Master of the Richmond Hounds. He liked to get away to Norfolk and to Sussex, happiest in the company of his dog Humbug, or in that of his nephews and nieces, who revered him. His company has done much work with disadvantaged youngsters, for instance preparing them for job interviews.
In recent months, Ant Gordon Lennox had been suffering from the auto-immune disease Guillain-barré Syndrome, after which it was discovered that a metastatic melanoma had spread to his brain.
He never married but is survived by his long-standing girlfriend Flora Soames.
Anthony Gordon Lennox, born April 29 1969, died October 7 2017