The Times of Tuesday 7 August told us that Louise Mensch MP had resigned. The fact of the resignation came as a surprise to many of us but the treatment given to the story by the Times offered an even bigger surprise.
I must first remind my readers that Mrs Mensch is our MP. She is the Conservative member for Corby and East Northamptonshire. When I say ‘our’ I mean those of us who live in Oundle (which is within East Northamptonshire) and have, until very, very recently thought of her as our MP. This feeling probably stems from the fact that the slender majority she achieved at the last general election – 1951 – was almost certainly achieved through the voting of Oundle’s Conservative supporters. She wooed us hard and needed to as she was aiming to replace a Labour MP, Phil Hope, who had almost certainly won his seat because of his appeal to Corby Labour voters. I don’t know how she feels about it but I think that Oundle’s support got her the seat. Personally I thought she was pretty impressive and I supported her candidacy in a meaningful way (I sent a cheque).
Louise Mensch MP resigned on 6th August. She gave as her reason that it was the only way to keep her family together. Mrs Mensch has three children and her current husband lives in New York. As far as I can tell, husband, Peter Mensch, hasn’t recently moved to New York, he has been living there for quite a while. The father of the three children is Anthony LoCicero, also an American, and was Mrs Mensch’s first husband.
When Louise, an elected MP, with three children, fell in love with and married another who inconveniently lived in a country far away. Somewhere along the road she must have divorced Mr LoCicero. So, I suppose, it made perfect sense for her to go and live with her new fella, taking her children with her. But the new fella lives in the USA and she’s an MP in the UK; so she couldn’t. ‘Twas a circle that couldn’t be squared.
One cannot blame someone for what someone else has said about them but Alison Pearson in the Daily Telegraph on 9 August said of her, ‘To become an MP when you have three children under the age of eight might be considered hard. To be an MP as a single mother with three children under eight and undertake regular media appearances is setting the bar giddily high’. I do believe that this single mother stuff is the impression the media have of the lady; whether or not they have been consciously given that impression and by whom I cannot say because I do not know.
It’s the single mother stuff that I find hard to take. If the Daily Telegraph report of 6 November 2011 is correct the lady was married to Mr Mensch by that date. So she wasn’t single after that date and she is not single now. So she’s not a single mother! She is ‘single’ only in the sense that she doesn’t have immediate access to her husband. That’s not the same as having a husband run off on you, or becoming a widow, or becoming a mother through having unprotected casual sex.
What we are left with is a lady who changed husbands in the mid-stream of her children’s lives and has been finding it rather difficult to manage because her new man lives abroad. What about employing help? A Nannie? People with far less money than Louise appears to have employ a Nannie to help with the children.
So the ‘single mother’ stuff, is no more than ‘de facto’ and is, as sunburn used to be regarded in the armed forces, a self-inflicted wound. And if you want to put the whole business into context imagine what would have been the reaction had a male MP done a similar thing? I need not continue on this theme.
What we have here is passion. Hot pants. And passion trumps reason.
We got married in a fever
Hotter than a pepper sprout
But … but … what about her responsibilities as our parliamentary representative? There may not have been a contract but wasn’t she elected for the four year term of the government? When she was up for selection at Conservative Party HQ in Corby what would have happened if she had said that she wanted to be selected and elected but reserved the right to swan off if her lovelife moved her in a different direction. I can tell you this with complete confidence; the selection committee wouldn’t have worn it.
So we, the constituents, are now unrepresented in Parliament and will remain so until November when a by-election will probably be held. Unless some available Tory superstar can be found it’s going to be a walkover for Labour. At the end of last week Ed Milliband turned up on the streets of Corby to rally the faithful and went on to Thrapston to press the flesh ( which on a TV clip shown on the News he called ‘Frampton’); how opportunist is that? Mr M didn’t come to Oundle which indicates his level of confidence in the by-election result.
In my opening sentence I referred to the treatment given to the Mensch story by The Times. On 7 August the paper carried a Page 3 News story headed, ‘Mensch resigns for sake of her family’ and one of those beautifully taken pics of what I think of as the ‘remodelled’ Mensch. This piece is opposite a leading article (Page 2) headed. ‘A Real Mensch – A work-life balance is as important for MPs as for the rest of us’. (I still don’t get the hidden reference. What’s a ‘real Mensch’? Is there a double-meaning lurking there? It missed me, anyway). Then, don’t go away yet, we find a Page 19 piece headed, ‘We can’t afford to lose people like Louise’ – and it’s a big piece, three quarters of a full page - and it is accompanied by another picture of the remodelled Mensch. So, by now we have the full story. Oh no we don’t, there’s more. The lady gets the entire cover of Times 2. This is in the same 7 August edition. Two thirds of the page devoted to a picture of the full remodelled Mensch, from toe to head, wearing a slinky black number, hands on hips and a smile of such magnificently smug self-satisfaction that it takes your eye off the background showing the Houses of Parliament, which is, come to think of it, entirely appropriate. It is headed ‘The mother of all arguments’. Don’t go away yet! There’s more. Turn the page and you see about two thirds of a page carrying the rest of the story and a slightly blurry picture of Mr and Mrs Mensch. The author of this piece, Carol Midgely, helps fulfil the prophesy of my earlier blog on Mrs Mensch (LOUISE MENSCH - ODD OUNDLE 9) by quoting what she has said about her new man. Of this I said she had probable committed a ‘Kinnock’ when she said of him, ‘I have strong feelings of hero worship towards him. I was longing to brand myself with his name for a very long time. He’s a living legend and to be his wife is the greatest honour. He is absolutely stunningly gorgeous. My palms still sweat with adrenaline whenever he walks into a room’. I think my wife knows how you feel, Louise and feels the same way about me but she keeps it to herself, she doesn’t want to embarrass me by saying damned stupid things in public.
Then The Times has yet another go at what has become the other Topic of the Week and devotes the whole of page 29 in the Saturday 11 August issue to the Mensch/working mothers debate. A picture of the remodelled Mensch occupies no less than 36% of the page. One thing that emerges from this is that what really matters to The Times is not about working mothers or female MPs who lose their bottle it is about being beautiful. I think the picture editor on this newspaper has fallen in love. Forget it, my friend, the lady is spoken for.
This level of coverage in is inexplicable. Unless, and here you must allow for my tendency to look for conspiracy theories, Mr Murdoch whom you may remember had something of a roasting from the lady at the recent phone-hacking enquiry, thought it would be amusing to create a huge public awareness of her so that any subsequent fall from grace would be even more damaging. But that’s just nonsense.
It’s probably more likely that what we see is the result of a combined assault on the paper’s journalists by a team of PR people at a time when the writers not covering the Olympics were experiencing what is known as a ‘slow news day’. And a besotted picture editor, of course.
So now, we hope, it’s all over. Mrs Mensch is packing her bags and all the impedimenta required by three children who are going to have to adjust to a very new life and that will be the last we see of her. Some time she might give thought to the later lines of the song I quoted earlier:
We’ve been talking ‘bout Jackson
Ever since the fire went out.
To return to the good people of Oundle: I think many of us feel as though the young woman they voted for so enthusiastically has simply dumped them and it leaves a bad taste. I think we now have to accept that our next MP will be Labour and if it turns out to be Phil Hope, the one replaced by Mrs Mensch a couple of years ago, that won’t be too bad.
Me, I feel dumped as well, and I should like to put to Mrs Mensch that as she’s given us half-measure in serving for only two years she might like to return to me half of the sum I sent to support her campaign.
Fat chance.
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