Louise Mensch

Louise Daphne Mensch (née Bagshawe; born 28 June 1971) is a British blogger, novelist, and former Conservative Member of Parliament.

Mensch won a 'Young Poet of the Year' award in 1989, at the age of 18.

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.

She went on to a career writing novels in the chick lit fiction genre, publishing seventeen works in all: fifteen of which have appeared under her maiden name.

They sold a total of over two million copies.

In the 1990s she became known as a writer of chick lit novels under her maiden name Louise Bagshawe.

Three days after the hearing, Mensch received an email that alleged, among other things, that she had taken drugs and danced while drunk with violinist Nigel Kennedy at a club in Birmingham in the 1990s.

Mensch publicly released the email, stating that the allegations were "highly probable" but said that she regretted only that others had to see her dancing and that she would not be deterred from asking further questions about phone hacking.

Members of the Parliamentary committee denounced the attempt to intimidate Mensch, who subsequently admitted in The Sunday Times that she had used class A drugs.

Her first novel, Career Girls, was published in 1995.

Mensch is an outspoken advocate of the genre, and has stated that it encourages girls to be ambitious.

Before her run for parliament, she said: "There was so much sex in the first novel, I thought, there is no way I am ever going to be an MP. How will I get past the blue rinse brigade?"

Reflecting further on her books, she stated: "All of them feature feminist heroines making it on their own. I simply couldn't write about some drippy Cinderella because I don't admire those women."

Mensch joined the Conservative Party when she was 14; her parents supported the party.

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 returned to the Conservatives, helping her mother Daphne win a seat on 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, later renamed the Hudson Union Society, with Joseph Pascal and Princess Badiya bint El Hassan of Jordan.

Conservative party leader David Cameron placed Mensch on his "A-List" of Conservative candidates in 2006.

In October 2006, she was selected to stand in the constituency of Corby, which she won at the 2010 general election with a majority of 1,951, defeating Labour incumbent Phil Hope.

She was elected Conservative MP for Corby at the 2010 UK general election.

In June 2010, she was elected by other Conservative MPs to serve on the Select Committee for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

On 19 July 2011, in the hearings of the House of Commons Select Committee for Culture, Media and Sport, Mensch interrogated James and Rupert Murdoch concerning their roles in the News of the World phone hacking scandal.

Political blogger Bagehot in The Economist named Mensch as the "surprise star" of the hearing, writing that her "sharp, precise, coolly scornful questions" contrasted with her "waffling, pompous" fellow committee members, and citing her clever confrontation of the Murdochs.

In the course of the hearings, Mensch erroneously stated 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 declined either to withdraw the allegation or to repeat it.

She later apologised to Morgan, and stated that she had misread a newspaper report about his book.

Mensch resigned as an MP in August 2012 to move to New York City to live with her second husband, American music manager Peter Mensch.

On 6 August 2012, Mensch resigned as the MP for Corby in order to move with her second husband, American music manager Peter Mensch, to New York City.

Mensch had appeared likely to be promoted in the expected September government reshuffle.

She began working for News Corp in 2014, and co-launched its Heat Street website in February 2016.

Since leaving Heat Street in December 2016, she has published primarily on her blog Patribotics, which she launched in January 2017, and her Twitter account.

She left News Corp entirely in March 2017.

Mensch and Heat Street have since courted controversy by promoting unverified claims, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories about the Trump administration and its ties to the Russian Federation.

Zack Beauchamp, a reporter for Vox who has written at length about Mensch, compared the conspiratorial nature of her output to that of Alex Jones, saying "I would say the closest analog would be Infowars".

BuzzFeed called Mensch an "anti-Russian influence crusader" and one of a number of "anti-Trump public figures [who] share unreliable information".

Louise Daphne Bagshawe was born in Westminster, London, daughter of Nicholas Wilfrid Bagshawe and Daphne Margaret (Triggs) Bagshawe, and was raised a Roman Catholic.

Her father is descended from the recusant (Catholic) Bagshawe family, of Wormhill Hall, near Buxton, Derbyshire, and of Oakes-in-Norton.

She was educated at Beechwood Sacred Heart School, Tunbridge Wells, and Woldingham School, a Catholic girls' boarding school in Surrey.

She read English Language and Literature at Christ Church, Oxford, and was Secretary of the Oxford Union.

She has a brother and two sisters, one of whom, Tilly Bagshawe, is a freelance journalist and author.