Louise Mensch Biography

Louise Daphne Mensch (ne Bagshawe; born 28 June 1971) is an English author and was the Conservative MP for Corby from 2010 to 2012. She is currently the head of the news website Heat Street.

Early and personal life

Mensch was born in London, England, the daughter of Nicholas Wilfrid Bagshawe and Daphne Margaret Triggs. She has a brother and two sisters, one of whom, Tilly Bagshawe, is a freelance journalist and author.

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 Roman Catholic property speculator. They have three children, but separated after nine years. The marriage ended in divorce. In June 2011, she married music manager Peter Mensch, whom she had met twenty years earlier.

Mensch is diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which made her realise she was "self medicating" with wine for stress, and she has now almost completely given up alcohol.

Writing career

Following a six-month internship at MTV Europe she worked as a press officer with EMI Records, 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 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. 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 2004 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 feminism of the " ", 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.

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.

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 reiterate 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.

Columnist

After leaving Parliament, Mensch wrote articles for several newspapers, including the The Times and The Sun. In January 2013 she became a columnist for The Sun on Sunday. In May 2014 Mensch started working for a company owned by Rupert Murdoch on "digital projects".

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 - pronounced "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 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 2012, while still a Member of Parliament, Louise Mensch admitted on the BBC current affairs panel show Question Time that "..I messed with my brain [by taking hard drugs]...It's had long-term mental health effects on me."

In June 2014, the Greek newspaper Kathimerini reported Mensch's remarks on her Twitter profile about Greece: "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 mocked in UK newspapers 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"?antisemitic if he were to use the term, Mensch replied in the affirmative.

In August 2015, Mensch 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.

Bibliography

Novels

Writing as Louise Bagshawe:

• 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)

Writing as Louise Mensch:

• Beauty (2014)
• "Career Game" (2015)

Anthology

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