Louise Mensch

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Louise Daphne Mensch MP
Member of Parliament
for Corby
Incumbent
Assumed office
6 May 2010
Preceded by Phil Hope
Majority 1,951 (3.6%)
Personal details
Born 28 June 1971 (1971-06-28) (age 40)
London, England, UK
Nationality British
Political party Conservative
Spouse(s) Anthony LoCicero (2000-2009)
Peter Mensch(2011-Present)
Children Three
Residence Oundle
Alma mater Christ Church, Oxford
Profession Writer
Religion Christian (Roman Catholicism)[1]
Website www.louisebagshawe.net/
www.louisebagshawebooks.com/

Louise Daphne Mensch (née Bagshawe, 28 June 1971 in England, UK) is an English author and Conservative Party politician. She became the Member of Parliament (MP) for Corby after winning the seat at the 2010 general election. She is also an author of "chick lit" fiction, writing under her maiden name Louise Bagshawe.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Born Louise Daphne Bagshawe on 28 June 1971 in London, England, is the daughter of Nicholas Wilfrid Bagshawe and Daphne Margaret née Triggs.[2] Her father comes from a family of Catholic gentry;[3] his grandfather was the marine artist Joseph Richard Bagshawe, who was himself grandson of one of the 19th century's most renowned marine artists Clarkson Stanfield,[4] and a nephew of Edward Gilpin Bagshawe, Catholic Bishop of Nottingham. Her paternal grandmother Mary Frideswide 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.[5] She is the sister of Tilly Bagshawe, a freelance journalist who published Adored in July 2005, and has a younger sister Alice and a brother, James.[6]

Her family moved to the country when she was seven. She was educated at Beechwood Sacred Heart School in Tunbridge Wells,[7] and Woldingham School, a Catholic girls' boarding school in Surrey, and was named "Young Poet of the Year" in 1989 at the age of 18.[8] After reading English literature at Christ Church, Oxford,[9] and 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),[10] and then a marketing official with Sony.

Louise Bagshawe married Anthony LoCicero, a property speculator, and they had three children, but after nine years the marriage ended in divorce.[11][12] In June 2011, she remarried Peter Mensch, the manager of Metallica, Jimmy Page and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.[13]

[edit] Writing career

Her first novel, Career Girls, was published in 1995 and has been followed by 13 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.[14]

[edit] Bibliography as Louise Bagshawe

[edit] Single 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)

[edit] Anthology

[edit] Politics

At the age of fourteen she had joined the Conservative Party, after being inspired by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,[11] but in 1996 she briefly switched to Tony Blair's Labour Party saying she believed him to be "socially liberal but an economic Tory".[15] By 1997 she had returned to the Conservatives and helped her mother, Daphne, win a seat in East Sussex County Council from the Liberal Democrats.[11] In 2001, Mensch co-founded the Oxonian Society with Joseph Pascal and Princess Badiya bint El Hassan of Jordan.[16]

[edit] Political career

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.[17] In October 2006 she was selected to stand in Corby.[18] As part of her campaigning for the 2010 election, she appeared on Question Time[8] and BBC One's The Big Questions.[19] She believes the foxhunting ban should be repealed on civil liberties grounds and that it was also a waste of Parliamentary time.[20]

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.[21]

She was a guest on Have I Got News for You on 22 April 2011. Her contribution was briefly censored because she alluded to the identity of a footballer involved in a super-injunction case.[22] Mensch appeared on the show for a second time on 21 October 2011, in which she was lampooned for her comments on the Occupy movement and her defence of capitalism.[23]

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 The Economist whilst admitting he had not previously been impressed named Mensch as the "surprise star" of the hearing saying her "sharp, precise, coolly scornful questions" contrasted with her "waffling, pompous" fellow committee members.[24] 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.[25] When challenged on CNN by Morgan, Mensch cited the protection of parliamentary privilege and refused to withdraw the allegation. However, she also refused to repeat it outside parliament, as it would leave her vulnerable to unlimited civil damages from Morgan.[26] She later apologised to Morgan, admitting that she had misread a newspaper report about the book.[27]

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 the EMI record company.[28] Mensch publicly released the email and admitted the allegations were "highly probable", but said she would not be deterred from asking further questions about phone hacking.[10][29]
She has also criticised media outlets for repeated questions about whether she has had plastic surgery.[30][31][32]

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.[33] She compared the action with brief interruptions to road and rail networks during emergencies.[33] However other Twitter users compared such action to Iran and China whilst Sussex police said they had used Twitter to stop rumours.[33]

In October 2011, Mensch tweeted that she was not in favour of a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU because she believed that it was unwinnable.[34]

[edit] Bibliography

  • Career Girls (1995)
  • The Movie (1996)
  • Tall Poppies (1997)
  • Venus Envy (1998)
  • A Kept Woman (2000)
  • When She Was Bad... (2001)
  • The Devil You Know (2003)
  • Monday's Child (2004)
  • Tuesday's Child (2005)
  • Sparkles (2006)
  • Glamour (2007)
  • Glitz (2008)
  • Passion (2009)
  • Desire (2010)
  • Destiny (2011)

[edit] References

  1. ^ "I cant believe Im a Tory". The Times (London). 2006-05-14. http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/style/article717693.ece. 
  2. ^ "Marriages". The Times: p. 12. 23 September 1969. 
  3. ^ "The Landed Gentry of Britain". Wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com. http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=PED&db=landgent&id=I3748. Retrieved 2011-11-08. 
  4. ^ David Cordingly (1996), Jane Turner, ed., "Stanfield, Clarkson" Grove Dictionary of Art, Macmillan Publishers 
  5. ^ The Catholic Who's Who and yearbook, Volume 33, 1940, p. 432 
  6. ^ Scott, Caroline (6 March 2005). "Relative Values: Tilly and Louise Bagshawe". The Sunday Times (London). http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article518349.ece. 
  7. ^ Who's Who 2011, A & C Black, 2011 
  8. ^ a b "Question Time:This week's panel". BBC News. 10 January 2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time/7181778.stm. Retrieved 2010-05-16. 
  9. ^ . http://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/ccm-09.pdf. 
  10. ^ a b Victoria King (29 July 2011). "Tory MP Louise Mensch 'probably took drugs in club'". BBC News. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-14342674. Retrieved 29 July 2011. 
  11. ^ a b c "Louise Mensch profile". http://www.conservatives.com/People/Members_of_Parliament/Mensch_Louise.aspx. 
  12. ^ Walker, Tim (27 May 2007). "Chick lit Tory candidate Louise Bagshawe splits from husband". The Daily Telegraph (London). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mandrake/5395444/Chick-lit-Tory-candidate-Louise-Bagshawe-splits-from-husband.html. Retrieved 2009-07-27. 
  13. ^ Walker, Tim (3 June 2011). "Tory MP Louise Bagshawe secretly marries Metallica manager Peter Mensch". The Daily Telegraph (London). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/8553011/Tory-MP-Louise-Bagshawe-secretly-marries-Metallica-manager-Peter-Mensch.html. Retrieved 2 June 2011. 
  14. ^ Louise Mensch (2011-07--08). "Chick-lit doesn't damage its readers, it just makes them raise their standards". London: Daily Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/8623588/Chick-lit-doesnt-damage-its-readers-itjust-makes-them-raisetheir-standards.html. Retrieved 2011-07--08. 
  15. ^ "'He sees women as equals'". London: BBC News. 2006-06-05. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/apr/19/uk.conservatives1. Retrieved 2008-04-28. 
  16. ^ "Today's Leaders, Tomorrow's Ideas. HUDSON UNION SOCIETY™". Oxoniansociety.com. http://www.oxoniansociety.com/About.asp. Retrieved 2011-11-08. 
  17. ^ "'Beautiful' Tory list under fire". BBC News. 2006-04-19. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5029462.stm. Retrieved 2008-04-28. 
  18. ^ 'Chick-lit' author to stand at next general election, Northampton Chronicle, 13 October 2006. Retrieved on 28 April 2008.
  19. ^ "BBC One Programmes - The Big Questions, Series 2, Episode 21". BBC. 14 Jun 2009. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00l7vc6. Retrieved 7 May 2010. 
  20. ^ Louise Bagshawe, ConservativeHome, 14 June 2006. Retrieved on 14 June 2006.
  21. ^ "Westminster select committees: Labour & Tory membership". Financial Times. June 24, 2010. http://blogs.ft.com/westminster/2010/06/westminster-select-committees-labour-tory-membership/. Retrieved 29-Jun-2010. 
  22. ^ Shipman, Tim (23 April 2011). "Privacy farce as BBC is forced to blank out parts of Have I Got News For You as MP almost identifies footballer at centre of injunction scandal". London: Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1379727/Gagging-order-judges-free-speech-privacy-celebrities.html. 
  23. ^ "Have I Got News For You". Have I Got News For You. BBC. 2011-10-21. No. 2, series 42.
  24. ^ "Rupert and James Murdoch before Parliament". The Economist. 19 July 2011. http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2011/07/british-press-and-phone-hacking-scandal-8. 
  25. ^ Swaine, Jon (20 July 2011). "Phone hacking: Piers Morgan in on-air hacking row with Louise Mensch". The Daily Telegraph (London). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/8649135/Phone-hacking-Piers-Morgan-in-on-air-hacking-row-with-Louise-Mensch.html. Retrieved 20 July 2011. 
  26. ^ Piers Morgan Refutes Hacking Allegations On CNN cnn.com, 2011-07-20.
  27. ^ "MP Mensch apologises to Piers Morgan for hacking slur". BBC News. 29 July 2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-14346050. Retrieved 29 July 2011. 
  28. ^ Sanchez, Raf (29 July 2011). "Louise Mensch releases email allegations made by journalist". The Independent (London). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8670599/Louise-Mensch-releases-email-allegations-made-by-journalist.html. Retrieved 29 July 2011. 
  29. ^ "Louise Mensch comes clean on Morgan, drugs and bad dancing". Channel 4 News. 29 July 2011. http://www.channel4.com/news/louise-mensch-comes-clean-on-morgan-drugs-and-bad-dancing. Retrieved 29 July 2011. 
  30. ^ "Newsnight - Coogan and Mensch clash over press regulation". BBC News. 2011-10-13. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/9614587.stm. Retrieved 2011-11-08. 
  31. ^ Decca Aitkenhead (2011-09-30). "Louise Mensch: 'We're not all ogres' | Politics". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/sep/30/louise-mensch-phone-hacking-politics. Retrieved 2011-11-08. 
  32. ^ "Has Louise Mensch had a facelift? Tory MP 'Cameron cutie' refuses to answer | Mail Online". Dailymail.co.uk. 2011-10-02. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2044248/Has-Louise-Mensch-facelift-Tory-MP-Cameron-cutie-refuses-answer.html. Retrieved 2011-11-08. 
  33. ^ a b c Martin Beckford (12 Aug 2011). "Louise Mensch MP calls for Twitter and Facebook blackout during riots". London: Daily Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8697850/Louise-Mensch-MP-calls-for-Twitter-and-Facebook-blackout-during-riots.html. Retrieved 14 Aug 2011. 
  34. ^ Published on Tue Oct 25 10:01:05 BST 2011. "Five Northamptonshire MPs among those who rebel against Government on EU debate - Local - Northampton Chronicle & Echo". Northamptonchron.co.uk. http://www.northamptonchron.co.uk/news/local/five_northamptonshire_mps_among_those_who_rebel_against_government_on_eu_debate_1_3179756. Retrieved 2011-11-08. 

[edit] External links

Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by
Phil Hope		 Member of Parliament for Corby
2010–present		 Incumbent
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