‘I was punching above my weight’: Rob Rinder opens up about his ‘joke’ engagement to Rylan Clark and life on GMB with Susanna Reid
- Rob Rinder, from London, says he doesn’t miss being in front of a judge or jury
- READ MORE: Robert Rinder holds back tears live on air as he returns to GMB
Any nice men out there who are good with their hands and like literature and classical music, please make yourself known to Rob Rinder.
The TV presenter and barrister is single at the moment but willing to be introduced. All that stuff about him being engaged to Rylan Clark was nonsense.
The pair are working on a travel show together and posted a joke betrothal against a romantic Italian backdrop, only for congratulations to flood in.
Rob offers his mitigation. ‘I’d had wine. I showed it to Rylan first and we thought it would be funny.
‘What we didn’t anticipate was people’s lack of irony and the number who stopped to congratulate us.
‘Though they were saying I was punching above my weight. Seems reasonable. I’d have to agree.’
Barrister Rob Rinder, from Southgate, London, says he doesn’t miss being in front of a jury or judge
Rob invites such interest because he’s not just a TV barrister these days but a bona fide celebrity too, an occasional presence alongside his friend Susanna Reid on the Good Morning Britain sofa, a bestselling author with his debut novel The Trial, and a former Strictly Come Dancing contestant (fifth in 2016).
He first found TV fame during his six years as ‘Judge’ Rinder, presiding over civil cases in a reality show court room, but soon he’ll be fronting Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond The Lobby alongside TV chef Monica Galetti.
Also to come are a series about prisons, examining issues such as capital punishment, and the show he’s making with Rylan, in which the pair re-create a 19th-century Grand Tour.
Previously, Rob has re-searched and presented serious and critically acclaimed documentaries about the Holocaust – he is Jewish, the grandson of a concentration camp survivor – and the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Yet after a decade on our screens, the 45-year-old has not surrendered his barrister’s ticket. His horsehair wig and robes are kept in a box at home, he mentors younger members of the profession, and could still get up on his feet in court if he chose.
His swift legal mind and prodigious learning make him one of TV’s more cerebral celebrities.
Ask Rob about Amazing Hotels, for example, and minutes later he’s still giving his opening statement: eloquent, analytic and persuasive. It’s all in there – the importance of their architecture, their contribution to the local economy, the part they can play in building a fairer society.
It turns out he’s a very discerning guest. ‘When I check into a hotel, the first room is just the opening offer. Wherever I go, I have to get my friends to have a drink while I befriend the manager, and we talk about where I’m finally going to sleep. I take it really seriously.’
Gosh, all that time discussing rooms. Does that make him a tricky travelling companion or would I enjoy a mini-break with him? ‘You’d love a mini-break with me,’ he laughs.
‘As long as you don’t mind the first bum-clenching two hours, you’d be happy where we ended up. I’m meticulously polite, but it’s a high-end consumer experience and you want it to be perfect.’
Soon he’ll be fronting Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond The Lobby alongside TV chef Monica Galetti (pictured)
Monica Galetti is his travelling companion for Amazing Hotels. ‘I’d happily marry her, but she’s taken,’ says Rob.
‘She’s just about the perfect spouse; somebody who could organise everything, has a piercing honesty but is kind with it, can cook you a gourmet dinner, and looks fabulous. What more do you need from a TV wife?’
So what’s his worst hotel ever? ‘I can’t say for fear of getting sued, but as a student I stayed in plenty decorated in what you might call “grotesque chic”, with a variety of uncatalogued organisms living in the rooms. Happily, those are a distant memory now.’
Further distant is his childhood in the north London suburb of Southgate, where his dad drove a black cab and his mum launched a publishing business from her bedroom.
Rob was seven when his parents split up but he remained close to his father and is blessed with a warm and happy relationship with his mother.
A smart grammar school boy, he went on to get a double first in politics and modern history at the University of Manchester.
He came out when he was 21 and married Seth Cummings, a fellow barrister and one-time advisor to George Osborne, in 2013. Benedict Cumberbatch, a friend from a brief spell performing in theatre at university, officiated at their Ibiza wedding after studying for an online ordination.
The TV presenter and barrister is single at the moment but willing to be introduced. All that stuff about him being engaged to Rylan Clark was nonsense
Rob returned the favour when he was best man for the actor at his wedding two years later.
He’d auditioned for the same part Benedict had gone for, and recognised he’d been outclassed.
‘I thought I’d done well, then I saw him deliver the same lines and it was so different. He had a fizz, a chemistry and an understanding of the text you just knew was what the writer wanted it to sound like,’ Rob has said.
He transferred his stage skills into debating, but says they haven’t helped him with his legal career.
‘If you’re in court, and you’re acting, the jury can tell pretty quickly, they care about that. If they decide they think you’re being inauthentic…’ he grimaces. But that early training does partly explain why he’s so good on TV.
The marriage sealed by the film star didn’t last, and Rob parted from his husband in 2018. Sources at the time said the break-up was amicable but deeply upsetting, with no one else involved.
Today Rob describes himself as ‘delightfully single’ and adds, ‘If you’re a lovely person who happens to enjoy reading, classical music and you’re a scaffolder, somebody who works with his hands, then I’m in.’
Any prospective love interest would have to like early nights though. Rylan recently posted a candid snap of Rob looking tired, hot and grumpy, sitting on the ground by a cashpoint machine in Italy. ‘Like taking ya nan out,’ read the caption.
‘It is precisely like going out with your nan,’ Rob says. ‘I’m not fun. That’s not even after a massive night out. That’s 10 o’clock.’
Since the end of his marriage, he’s had a laser focus on his TV career. First came the 2020 BBC two-parter My Family, The Holocaust And Me and then this year’s The Holy Land And Us.
Rob is the grandson of one of the Windermere Children, the 300 concentration camp survivors airlifted to the Lake District in 1945 to start new lives.
‘I’m really proud, out and loud about my faith,’ he says. ‘For me, it’s not a cultural thing, it’s a spiritual relationship with the world and with other people. It is immeasurably important to me.
Rinder occasionally finds himself scrutinising a trial and thinking he’d have presented the case differently
‘The Holocaust documentary is everybody’s story. It teaches us about what happens when we forget to safeguard, preserve, protect and defend democratic values under the rule of law. Yes, it’s a story of the Holocaust but it’s the end of it. The critical thing for us all to learn is, how did it begin?
‘The story of Israel-Palestine is one where I want people to walk away not necessarily having their minds changed, or even dealing with the limitless complexity of it, but having heard the human stories.
‘A win for us on Judge Rinder wasn’t where people were demonstrating high drama, it was where they’d leave court having been conscripted to hear one another and resolve a dispute.
‘How we come to consider and talk to each other as two people of good will, rather than shouting, is by beginning a conversation. Why do you think this? And the answer is, here’s my story.’
So, Jewish, gay and working class, Rob wasn’t an obvious fit for the Bar when he was called in 2001.
Indeed, he takes a swipe at the old school tie network that once dominated the legal profession with one of the less-likeable characters in The Trial. He also owns the fact that he cleans his house before his cleaner comes.
‘I just want her to rearrange the dust. It is a special brand of class violence to expect your cleaner to clean your toilet.’
Those early years of his pupillage can’t have been easy but they gave him rip-roaring material for The Trial, whose protagonist Adam is, ahem, a brilliant working-class young barrister from north London, the son of a Jewish single mother.
The novel has already been optioned for TV, and Adam’s mum is going to be a peach of a part, endlessly fussing about the contents of his fridge and his romantic prospects.
Susanna Reid may be tempted to play herself. She appears early on in the book, interviewing star policeman Grant Cliveden, who’s soon to drop dead at the Old Bailey, felled by poison.
Rob didn’t tell Susanna she was in it, he just sent her a copy to read because she ‘doesn’t like putting herself at the centre of attention so I’m not confident she would have loved being at the heart of it’.
Rob’s there of course, in the guise of Adam. How much does he really have in common with his protagonist?
‘He’s a working-class guy. I think he’s probably retained his accent more, whereas I sound like I’ve been mugged by a Mitford. I think it’s in the sense that he feels like an outsider who’s found himself in a job which, for most of his life, people have told him is for other people.’
Lots of the anecdotes are true too, such as the serial shoplifter who was so grateful to the brief who got her off she went and shoplifted a box of chocolates as a thank-you gift. (This happened to a colleague of Rob’s.)
With a new writing career (there’s a second book in the works, where the victim dies live on TV) and a relentless filming schedule, there’s not going to be tons of time for Rob’s legal work.
Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond The Lobby starts on Sunday at 8pm on BBC2 and iPlayer. Pictured: Rob Rinder and Monica Galetti
Occasionally he finds himself scrutinising a trial and thinking he’d have presented the case differently.
‘But I don’t miss being in front of a jury or a judge,’ he clarifies. ‘To do that, you can’t be part-time, you have to be all in, not just intellectually, but emotionally and spiritually dedicated to it too.’
He used to specialise in complex international fraud cases, although he also represented British soldiers charged with manslaughter after the deaths of detainees in Iraq, and worked on the machine gun drive-by killing of two innocent teenagers caught in the crossfire of a Birmingham gang war.
But when you ask him about his proudest moment in court, he doesn’t pick a specific case, rather a point of principle: ‘All the cases that have been about enabling people to have access to justice, the stuff they were entitled to but which, without somebody to have a voice for them, they wouldn’t necessarily have got. In other words, where you’re an agent for the empowerment of others.’
He concludes with an analogy between the law and the world’s greatest hotels, saying that they may have ‘a great big sheen of glamour’ but the lives behind their facades are ‘as complex and difficult and challenging as any other’.
They’re the ones he likes to interrogate, whether it’s as a barrister, a breakfast TV presenter or a serious documentary maker.
It’s the material that matters, M’Lud, not how it’s packaged.
- Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond The Lobby starts on Sunday at 8pm on BBC2 and iPlayer.
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