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Louise Mensch

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 212.139.97.155 (talk) at 22:04, 26 May 2012 (added the link to her actual admission of class A drug use in GQ magazine (it was not merely an allegation, so should be included)). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Louise Mensch
MP
Member of Parliament
for Corby
Assumed office
6 May 2010
Preceded byPhil Hope
Majority1,951 (3.6%)
Personal details
Born (1971-06-28) 28 June 1971 (age 53)
London, England, UK
Political partyConservative
Other political
affiliations		Labour (1996–1997)
Spouse(s)Anthony LoCicero (2000–2009)
Peter Mensch (2011 – present)
Children3
ResidenceOundle
Alma materChrist Church, Oxford
ProfessionWriter
Websitewww.louisebagshawe.net/
www.louisebagshawebooks.com/

Louise Daphne Mensch (née Bagshawe; born 28 June 1971) is an English Conservative Party MP. She was elected MP for Corby at the 2010 general election. Under the name Louise Bagshawe she is an author of chick lit fiction.

Biography

Louise Daphne Bagshawe, born on 28 June 1971 in London, England, is the daughter of Nicholas Wilfrid and Daphne Margaret Bagshawe née Triggs.[2] Her father comes from a family of Roman 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, 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.[5] She is the sister of Tilly Bagshawe, a freelance journalist and author, and also has a younger sister Alice and a brother, James.[6]

Her family moved to the countryside when she was seven. She was educated at Beechwood Sacred Heart School in Tunbridge Wells,[7] 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.[8] After reading English Language and 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 as a marketing official for 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 married Peter Mensch, the manager of Metallica, Jimmy Page and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.[13]

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]

Politics

By the age of 14 she had joined the Conservative Party, inspired by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,[11] but in 1996 she briefly switched to the Labour Party saying she believed Tony Blair 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]

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 its debate and implementation was 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]

Phone Hacking Scandal Leads To Her Class A Drug Abuse Admission

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.[22] 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.[23] 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.[24] She later apologised to Morgan, admitting that she had misread a newspaper report about the book.[25]

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.[26] 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. She subsequently admitted using cocaine and other class A drugs in the March issue of GQ Magazine, in a photoshoot entitled 'Iron Maiden'. [10][27]
[28]
She has also criticised media outlets for repeated questions about whether she has had plastic surgery.[29][30][31]

Control of social networking during riots

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.[32] She compared the action with brief interruptions to road and rail networks during emergencies.[32] However other Twitter users compared such action to Iran and China whilst Sussex police said they had used Twitter to stop rumours.[32]

National Health Service reforms

In March 2012, a group of 240 doctors, including 30 professors, wrote to the The Independent describing the NHS reforms as an "embarrassment to democracy" which had no support from professional healthcare organisations.[33] They blamed the Bill’s supporters for putting the Coalition survival “above professional opinion, patient safety and the will of the citizens of this country”. They pledged to stand as candidates against MPs who backed it and as "an A list, successful author and vocal new MP" Mensch was mentioned as a likely target despite her lack of promotion.[33]

Bibliography as Louise Bagshawe

Single novels

Publications

  • 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)

Anthology

References

  1. ^ "I cant believe Im a Tory". The Times. London. 14 May 2006.
  2. ^ "Marriages". The Times. 23 September 1969. p. 12.
  3. ^ "The Landed Gentry of Britain". Wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com. Retrieved 8 November 2011.
  4. ^ David Cordingly (1996), Jane Turner (ed.), ""Stanfield, Clarkson"", Grove Dictionary of Art, Macmillan Publishers
  5. ^ The Catholic Who's Who and Yearbook, vol. 33, 1940, p. 432
  6. ^ Scott, Caroline (6 March 2005). "Relative Values: Tilly and Louise Bagshawe". The Sunday Times. London.
  7. ^ Who's Who 2011, A & C Black, 2011
  8. ^ a b "Question Time:This week's panel". BBC News. 10 January 2008. Retrieved 16 May 2010.
  9. ^ http://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/ccm-09.pdf. {{cite news}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  10. ^ a b Victoria King (29 July 2011). "Tory MP Louise Mensch 'probably took drugs in club'". BBC News. Retrieved 29 July 2011.
  11. ^ a b c "Louise Mensch profile".
  12. ^ Walker, Tim (27 May 2007). "Chick lit Tory candidate Louise Bagshawe splits from husband". The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 27 July 2009.
  13. ^ Walker, Tim (3 June 2011). "Tory MP Louise Bagshawe secretly marries Metallica manager Peter Mensch". The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 2 June 2011.
  14. ^ Louise Mensch (8 July 2011). "Chick-lit doesn't damage its readers, it just makes them raise their standards". Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 8 July 2011.
  15. ^ "'He sees women as equals'". London: BBC News. 5 June 2006. Retrieved 28 April 2008.
  16. ^ "Today's Leaders, Tomorrow's Ideas. HUDSON UNION SOCIETY™". Oxoniansociety.com. Retrieved 8 November 2011.
  17. ^ "'Beautiful' Tory list under fire". BBC News. 19 April 2006. Retrieved 28 April 2008.
  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 June 2009. 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. 24 June 2010. Retrieved 29 June 2010.
  22. ^ "Rupert and James Murdoch before Parliament". The Economist. 19 July 2011.
  23. ^ Swaine, Jon (20 July 2011). "Phone hacking: Piers Morgan in on-air hacking row with Louise Mensch". The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 20 July 2011.
  24. ^ Piers Morgan Refutes Hacking Allegations On CNN cnn.com, 20 July 2011.
  25. ^ "MP Mensch apologises to Piers Morgan for hacking slur". BBC News. 29 July 2011. Retrieved 29 July 2011.
  26. ^ Sanchez, Raf (29 July 2011). "Louise Mensch releases email allegations made by journalist". The Independent. London. Retrieved 29 July 2011.
  27. ^ "Louise Mensch comes clean on Morgan, drugs and bad dancing". Channel 4 News. 29 July 2011. Retrieved 29 July 2011.
  28. ^ (Iron Maiden: http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/comment/articles/2012-02/02/louise-mensch-mp-interview).
  29. ^ "Newsnight – Coogan and Mensch clash over press regulation". BBC News. 13 October 2011. Retrieved 8 November 2011.
  30. ^ Decca Aitkenhead (30 September 2011). "Louise Mensch: 'We're not all ogres' | Politics". The Guardian. Retrieved 8 November 2011.
  31. ^ "Has Louise Mensch had a facelift? Tory MP 'Cameron cutie' refuses to answer | Mail Online". Daily Mail. 2 October 2011. Retrieved 8 November 2011.
  32. ^ a b c Martin Beckford (12 August 2011). "Louise Mensch MP calls for Twitter and Facebook blackout during riots". Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 14 August 2011. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
  33. ^ a b Jane Merrick & Brian Brady (18 March 2012). "Doctors bid to unseat 50 MPs in revenge over NHS bill". The Independent. Retrieved 3 April 2012.

External links

As politician
As author etc.
Interviews
Parliament of the United Kingdom

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