Louise Mensch

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.

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 initially criticised by IT industry experts for using http instead of secure https to communicate passwords. Bozier disputed this claim, but the site switched to the secure protocol. Menshn closed in February 2013.

After leaving Parliament and moving to the US in 2012, Mensch began working as an independent journalist and also wrote articles for several newspapers, including The Times, and The Guardian. In The Guardian she wrote two articles advocating "reality-based feminism", in particular "Conservative feminism" or "Tory feminism", and critical of Britain's "modern feminist movement" (including equality impact assessment), which she called "ultra-feminism" and contrasted unfavourably with "American feminism".

In May 2014, Mensch started developing new digital projects for News Corporation. In February 2016 she co-launched Heat Street, a libertarian news, opinion and commentary website, with television executive Noah Kotch. On Heat Street, Mensch interviewed Adam Baldwin regarding the movement involved in the Gamergate controversy, claiming that it was Baldwin who created the Gamergate hashtag to "describe the scandal of falsely accused young men", and suggesting it is a hashtag that "divided the feminists – like me – and the fauxminists".

Mensch left Heat Street in mid-December 2016, and launched her own political blog, Patribotics, in January 2017. The blog is controversial, and cites unnamed sources in the intelligence community, publishing numerous conspiracy theories that have either remained unverified or debunked altogether. Mensch has stated that she prefers the freedom of self-publishing, which having her own blog affords; she told The Guardian, "I didn't want to be subject to an editing process. Editors would ask: who are your sources? And I can't tell them."

Mensch left News Corp entirely in March 2017.

In 2000, she married Italian-American real estate developer Anthony LoCicero. They have three children, but separated in 2009 and later divorced. In June 2011, she married American music manager Peter Mensch, whom she first met 20 years earlier, and resided with him in New York City until their divorce in August 2019. She currently lives in Manhattan where she invests in real estate.

Mensch disclosed in May 2016 that she was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which made her realise she was "self medicating" with wine for stress and, as a result, has almost completely given up alcohol.

Drug use

Mensch has also commented, on BBC TV's Question Time during a debate on calls to decriminalise hard drugs, about taking hard drugs in her twenties, and subsequently told the press, in 2012: "It is something that I regret incredibly, that in my youth... I messed with my brain. I said we all do stupid things when we are young. It's had long-term mental health effects on me."

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

Murdoch phone hacking affair

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.

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.