Louise Mensch

Louise Mensch
Member of Parliament for Corby
In office 6 May 2010 – 29 August 2012
Preceded by	Phil Hope
Succeeded by	Andy Sawford
Majority	1,951 (3.6%)
Personal details
Born	Louise Daphne Bagshawe (1971-06-28) 28 June 1971 London, England
Nationality	British
Political party	Conservative (before 1996 and since 1997)
Other political affiliations	Labour (1996 to 1997)
Spouse(s)	Anthony LoCicero (m. 2000; div. 2009) Peter Mensch (m. 2011)
Children	3
Residence	New York City
Alma mater	Christ Church, Oxford
Profession	Writer
Religion	Roman Catholicism

Louise Mensch (née Louise Daphne Bagshawe; born 28 June 1971) is an English author who writes under her maiden name. She was the Conservative Member of the UK Parliament (MP) for Corby from 2010 to 2012.

Early and personal life

Mensch was born in London, England, the daughter of Daphne Margaret (née Triggs) and Nicholas Wilfrid Bagshawe. She is the sister of Tilly Bagshawe, a freelance journalist and author, a younger sister Alice, and a brother, James.

Her father comes from a family of Roman Catholic gentry; his grandfather was the marine artist Joseph Richard Bagshawe, who was a grandson of marine artist Clarkson Stanfield, and a nephew of Edward Gilpin Bagshawe, Roman Catholic Bishop of Nottingham. Her paternal grandmother Mary Frideswide Bagshawe was the daughter of Charles Robertson, a stockbroker and benefactor of St Philip's Priory, Begbroke and one of the co-founders of Westminster Cathedral.

Her family moved to the countryside when she was seven. She was educated at Beechwood Sacred Heart School, Tunbridge Wells, and Woldingham School, a Roman Catholic girls' boarding school in Surrey, and was named "Young Poet of the Year" in 1989 at the age of 18. She read English Language and Literature at Christ Church, Oxford and was Secretary of the Oxford Union.

Bagshawe married Anthony LoCicero, an Anglo-Italian Catholic property speculator. They have three children, but separated after nine years and the marriage ended in divorce. In June 2011, she married music manager Peter Mensch, whom she had met twenty years earlier. She has criticised media outlets for repeated questions about her having had a facelift.

Writing career

Following a six-month internship at MTV Europe she worked as a press officer with EMI Records (a position from which she was formally dismissed), and then as a marketing official for Sony Music.

Her first novel, Career Girls, was published in 1995 and has been followed by 16 subsequent works in the chick lit genre aimed at young women. She has defended chick lit against allegations, specifically by psychologist Susan Quilliam, that the books cause irrationally high expectations which "ruin readers' lives" by saying that such books merely make readers raise their standards.

Political career

With parents who were active in the party, Mensch had joined the Conservatives when she was 14. Subsequently in 1996, she switched to the Labour Party, saying that she believed Tony Blair to be "socially liberal but an economic Tory" . By 1997 she had returned to the Conservatives, helped her mother, Daphne, win a seat in East Sussex County Council from the Liberal Democrats. and campaigned in the 1997, 2001 and 2005 general elections. In 2001, Mensch co-founded the Oxonian Society with Joseph Pascal and Princess Badiya bint El Hassan of Jordan.

Mensch was placed on the A-List of Conservative candidates in 2006. This move was criticised by David Burrowes, from the socially conservative Cornerstone Group of Tory MPs, as favouring "minor celebrities", such as Mensch, over local candidates when selecting prospective parliamentary candidates. In October 2006 she was selected to stand in Corby. As part of her campaigning for the 2010 election, she appeared on Question Time and BBC One's The Big Questions.

She believes the fox hunting ban should be repealed on civil liberties grounds, and that its debate and implementation was a waste of Parliamentary time. Mensch advocates "reality-based feminism", in particular "Conservative feminism" or "Tory feminism", and she has criticised what she sees as "ultra-feminism", "the ghetto feminism of the impact equalities assessment" (sic), and Britain's "modern feminist movement", which she contrasts unfavourably with "American feminism".

In the 2010 general election Mensch won the seat of Corby with a majority of 1,951, defeating Labour incumbent Phil Hope, and in June 2010 she was elected by other Conservative MPs to serve on the Select Committee for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

Phone hacking scandal

On 19 July 2011, in the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, Mensch took part in the questioning of James and Rupert Murdoch over the News of the World phone hacking scandal.

Political blogger Bagehot in The Economist named Mensch as the "surprise star" of the hearing saying her "sharp, precise, coolly scornful questions" contrasted with her "waffling, pompous" fellow committee members. Mensch later faced criticism for incorrectly claiming during the committee that Piers Morgan had written in his autobiography about conducting phone hacking while he was the editor of the Daily Mirror. When challenged on CNN by Morgan, Mensch cited the protection of parliamentary privilege and refused to withdraw the allegation; however, she also refused to openly repeat it. She later apologised to Morgan, claiming that she had misread a newspaper report about the book.

Three days later Mensch received an email alleging that she had taken a controlled substance with Nigel Kennedy at Ronnie Scott's club in Birmingham in the 1990s while working as a press officer for EMI Records. Mensch publicly released the email and admitted the allegations were "highly probable", but said she regretted only that others had to see her dancing and would not be deterred from asking further questions about phone hacking. She subsequently admitted using class A drugs in The Sunday Times.

The Culture, Media and Sport select committee finalised its report in April 2012. Mensch disagreed publicly with Tom Watson and Paul Farrelly, two Labour members of the committee, over whether the conclusion that Rupert Murdoch was unfit to run an international company, had been discussed before Watson tabled a Commons amendment on 30 April. Mensch and the other three Conservative members of the committee had opposed it, and could not support the report with the MP herself saying the report had become "partisan" as a result of the statement's inclusion. Mensch insisted on Newsnight on 2 May that it had not been discussed and was not part of its remit. Watson later accused Mensch of tabling pro-Murdoch amendments which would have "exonerated" James Murdoch in the report and, in Twitter exchanges with her, alleged private committee conversations had been leaked to News Corp. Despite this disagreement, Mensch has often commented respectfully about Tom Watson's abilities on Twitter.

Control of social networking

Following the 2011 England riots Mensch called for social media services Twitter and Facebook to be shut down or to "take an hour off" during disturbances to stop the spread of false rumours wasting police resources. She compared the action with brief interruptions to road and rail networks during emergencies. However, other Twitter users compared such action to the online censorship of regimes such as Iran and China, whilst Sussex police said they had used Twitter to stop rumours.

In June 2012, a man was given a 26-week prison sentence suspended for two years for sending Mensch an offensive and threatening email including threats against her children. Following his conviction, Mensch called for networking sites to identify anonymous bullies saying it was impossible for the victim to ascertain the seriousness of the threat posed, while the bullies felt they could do as they pleased without fear of retribution.

Cyberbullying

In May 2012, Mensch used her Twitter account to condemn abusive and threatening tweets that she had received, describing them as "misogyny and bullying". The tweets were subsequently reported in the mainstream press, and she received support for drawing attention to the issue from Jeremy Vine and Isabel Hardman, among others. In March 2014, Mensch was herself accused of cyberbullying after she sent a series of tweets to a journalist, which included personal remarks about his appearance. Similar personal remarks were sent by Mensch to Kim Dotcom in March 2015.

In May 2015, after that year's general election, Mensch was accused of cyberbullying leader of the 'Milifandom', teenager Abby Tomlinson. Mensch denied the accusation, asserting that she had only criticised Tomlinson. Shortly afterwards, she wrote a 4,000 word blog entry to re-interate that she had not bullied Tomlinson, but made new assertions about the sixth-form student.

Resignation

On 6 August 2012, Mensch announced her decision to resign as the MP for Corby in order to spend more time with her family in New York City. Mensch had appeared likely to be promoted in the expected September government reshuffle. She told her local newspaper that she had intended to stand down at the next election, but brought the date forward as she was concerned her children would be too settled in Britain by then. She was appointed to the nominal position of Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead on 29 August 2012, thus vacating her seat. The subsequent by-election was won by Andy Sawford for the Labour party.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Norman Tebbit criticised Conservative Central Office for removing the right of constituencies to choose local candidates, a move which he says has both caused the collapse of grassroot party membership and weakened the bond between members and constituents. He said it appeared that Mensch had "put her newly acquired husband above the constituents that her website still says she was honoured to have been elected to represent" two years ago and that her attitude to her obligations appeared casual."

Following her resignation, she warned women against regular consumption of alcohol, which she associated with her diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder.

Columnist

After leaving Parliament, Mensch wrote articles for a number of newspapers, including the The Times and The Sun. In January 2013 she became a columnist for The Sun on Sunday.

Internet ventures

Menshn.com

In June 2012, Mensch joined forces with former Labour digital adviser Luke Bozier to set up a social networking website – a politics-based rival to Twitter. The site, named Menshn – a reference to "mention" – allowed users to select their topic of interest. Mensch hoped to raise venture capital finance. The site was slated by IT industry experts for its lack of security. Menshn closed in February 2013.

Unfashionista.com

After the closure of menshn, Mensch announced she was setting up a style and fashion blog called unfashionista. The website, unfashionista.com, was covered widely in the British press. The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and others all ran articles – giving it mixed reviews – and Mumsnet made her a featured blogger on their bloggers' network. unfashionista's blog posts have subsequently become more associated with Mensch's campaign topics, especially regarding Tim Hunt.

Hudson Union Society

Mensch is a co-founder of the Hudson Union Society.

Controversy

In June 2014, the Greek newspaper Kathimerini reported Mensch's remarks on her Twitter profile about Greeks: "F*** you, Greece. Nasty things happening to nasty people." The remarks were further reported in the Greek press and in the media.

Mensch made regular appearances in the media after the death of Margaret Thatcher, calling those who celebrated her death a "vocal minority", "idiots", and "pygmies", as well as swearing during an interview on This Morning. She was criticised for her conduct by some in the British press.

Mensch has been ridiculed for combining a tenaciously philosemitic defence of "the Jewish people" with an ignorance of Jewish history. She once tweeted that the term Zionist was merely an antisemitic code word for Jew; when asked by another user whether she would consider Theodor Herzl—one of the founding fathers of Zionism and who has been dead for more than a century—antisemitic if he were to use the term, Mensch replied in the affirmative.

Following the death of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in January 2015, Mensch used a series of expletives on Twitter to point out Saudi human rights abuses during his reign and to criticize David Cameron and the Queen over tributes to him.

In July 2015, Mensch reacted to allegedly sexist comments by Nobel Prize winner Tim Hunt by researching the backgrounds of various people involved in the luncheon at which he spoke. Afterwards, she wrote an exhaustive blog post which defended Hunt and criticized the ethics of Connie St Louis, Deborah Blum and Ivan Oransky, the first three journalists to condemn his speech. Her final work on the subject, in December 2015, unearthed previously unreported details of the conference in Korea where the lunch took place and exposed collusion among science journalists.

In August 2015, the former MP tweeted a screenshot suggesting that antisemitic searches were being made by Jeremy Corbyn supporters to purposefully trigger offensive auto-complete suggestions for her Twitter account. Other users quickly pointed out that her screenshot was actually of her own search history. Mensch denied attempting to smear the Corbyn campaign.

In September 2015, Mensch tweeted in defense of UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who had been accused of inappropriate sexual conduct with the severed head of a dead pig while enrolled at Oxford. She was criticized by Ellen Stewart in The Independent for referring to a pig as an "inanimate object", insinuating that the story was not important if true, and questioning whether the journalists critical of Cameron had done "silly things" while "drunk at college".

Bibliography (as Louise Bagshawe and Louise Mensch)

Novels

• Career Girls (1995)
• The Movie (1996) aka Triple Feature
• Tall Poppies (1997)
• Venus Envy (1998)
• A Kept Woman (2000) aka For All the Wrong Reasons
• When She Was Bad... (2001)
• The Devil You Know (2003)
• Monday's Child (2004) aka The Go–To Girl
• Tuesday's Child (2005)
• Sparkles (2006)
• Glamour (2007)
• Glitz (2008)
• Passion (2009)
• Desire (2010)
• Destiny (2011)
• Beauty (2014) writing as Louise Mensch
• "Career Game" (2015) writing as Louise Mensch

Anthology

• Five Romantic Reads (2005) (with Donna Hay, Laura Wolf, Jane Elizabeth Varley and Stella Chaplin)

External links

• Profile at Parliament of the United Kingdom
• Current session contributions in Parliament at Hansard
• Voting record at Public Whip
• Record in Parliament at TheyWorkForYou
• Profile at Westminster Parliamentary Record
• Profile at BBC News Democracy Live
• Articles authored at Journalisted
• Louise Mensch at the Internet Movie Database
• Works by or about Louise Mensch in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Louise Mensch on Twitter
• Articles authored as Louise Bagshawe at Journalisted
• Menshn.com
• Louise Bagshawe Books

Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by Phil Hope	Member of Parliament for Corby 2010–2012	Succeeded by Andy Sawford