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Provocative, entertaining, infuriating: I'm going to miss Louise Mensch

How many British backbenchers are reliably interesting?

By Helen Lewis Published 06 August 2012 10:19

Louise Mensch: so long and thanks for all the LOLs. Photo: Getty

So, farewell then, Louise Mensch. I'm going to miss you.

How many backbenchers are reliably provocative, entertaining - and occasionally infuriating? Very few. Our 24-hour news cycle, and the "fishing for gaffes" this inevitably encourages, mean that most junior MPs keep their mouths firmly shut on anything which doesn't directly concern them. (Incidentally, this is why we all fall on the latest story about Boris Johnson whipping Princess Anne with a conger eel or being "ironically" offensive like a man dying of thirst.)

Nowhere was Mensch more effective than on Twitter. Politicians' feeds tend to be a blather of trilling proclamations about their constituency duties, interspersed with solemn attacks on the other side. Not so with Mensch. Every so often, she would toss some chum into the piranha-swamp of lobby correspondents, just for the hell of it.

Her name change. Her announcement she'd have to be quick at the select committee questioning James Murdoch because she needed to pick up the kids. Her photoshoot for GQ. Her Newsnight appearances. Her alleged facelift. Her mad decision to launch a social network named after her. All these were endlessly pored over, probed for What They Said About Society.

Possibly my favourite Magic Menschment, though, was her admission she'd taken drugs with the violinist Nigel Kennedy. This is how to respond when someone accuses you of getting high in a club in your twenties:

Although I do not remember the specific incident, this sounds highly probable. I thoroughly enjoyed working with Nigel Kennedy, whom I remember with affection. I am not a very good dancer and must apologise to any and all journalists who were forced to watch me dance that night.

Of course, there were plenty of journalists who were ready to dismiss her as a tedious controversialist -- yet this never prevented their papers writing up her latest provocation. (Just a few days ago she stirred up a perfect storm about Labour supporters wishing Margaret Thatcher dead.)

For all that Mensch was an attention-seeker, the British political press liked having its attention sought. And, presumably, its readers lapped up stories about Mensch even as they loudly proclaimed how much they didn't care about her. Clicks don't lie.

By resigning mid-parliament, in the quiet August recess, Mensch has once again guaranteed herself coverage far out of proportion to her importance. Stand by for articles on whether women can have it all, which will completely ignore the fact that very few women marry someone who lives on a different continent. Brace yourself for pious warbling about her lack of commitment to politics (as if most of our politicians are motivated by nothing but the highest ideals of public service). But most of all, prepare for British politics to get a lot duller.

We created Louise Mensch: built her up through our desire for someone, somewhere, to say something interesting. And we'll miss her more than she misses us.

Tags: feminism

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34 comments

Mon, 2012-09-03 17:13 — George Dreahing (not verified)

Ms Lewis obsession with Ms Mensch seems a little like Julie Burchills adoration of Mrs T. She is controversial strong woman and this forgives all sins. I wonder what her reaction would be if Neil Hamilton had made same tweets . Don't worry if you follow Julie's path to right, which you seem to be, a love of Nick Cohen, Michael Gove , Israeli bulldozers, and religion. All the best.

Mon, 2012-09-03 17:12 — George Dreahing (not verified)

Wed, 2012-08-22 18:13 — hugh markey (not verified)

Louise is such a brave woman. Being forcibly extradited to the United States , this Tory MP speaks her mind without fear or favour.
No, there is no ulterior motive, no serpentine use of feminine wiles; no, just truth speaking to power.
Louise is certainly not trying to get the job of Justice Minister for herself. Just a little diversionary action before joining that Alpha Male Republican Herd where a female woman knows her place is in the kitchen. Yes, deah!

Motor-mouth

Thu, 2012-08-09 13:28 — AndrewD (not verified)

Fair play to you for a gracious article Ms Lewis.

Louise Mensch suffers from a variety of handicaps that infuriate most of the left ; she is intelligent, beautiful, blonde and right wing. A combination that they find quite unforgiveable.

Good for you for overlooking these sins and giving her a fair shake.

Mon, 2012-08-13 05:44 — susan galea (not verified)

She was New Labour before she became right wing. Not sure what store you should set by her right wing credentials! I think she handicapped herself by being briefed by News International when she was supposed to be asking searching questions of the Murdochs et al.

Thu, 2012-08-09 06:31 — McMac

I always found her a bit moronic. For sexists who obsessed about her gender she stood out, for the rest she was a low ranking politician who wasn't very good at it.

Wed, 2012-08-08 17:43 — Mike Hall (not verified)

What made Louise Mensch special was that she had no real axe to grind apart from a wish to make things better. She actually listened to people and sometimes reappraised her own viewpoint if she decided that they were right and she was wrong. However, she was no Conservative and would have been a member of the Liberal party, if they weren't unelectable due to some of their barking-mad views over Europe.

Tue, 2012-08-07 20:53 — The grand old Duke of talk (not verified)

"Clicks don't lie."

I don't think this is true. Often I will open a blog with half-hearted interest and quicky get bored. I think politics will be better without her. I can't say why, she was just irritating really.

Tue, 2012-08-07 17:13 — Pawel (not verified)

"How many backbenchers are reliably provocative, entertaining - and occasionally infuriating?"

Anne Widdecombe, maybe?

Mensch was just infuriating. No doubt she'll be writing the same line of bovine excrement for the Puffington Host before you know it.

Tue, 2012-08-07 16:08 — Romany (not verified)

"And we'll miss her more than she misses us. "
I think you should get out more.

Tue, 2012-08-07 15:41 — Nick Hart

I cannot imagine that La Mensch could care less about being patronised by a lefty scribbler on a dying Lab mag who seemingly never learned 'elitist' grammar at school.

Tue, 2012-08-07 14:21 — John Davies (not verified)

Louise who?

Mon, 2012-08-06 20:09 — myouz (not verified)

Come on New Statesman why don't you give us the real reason why she has resigned. WHat is the real scandal!!!!!

Tue, 2012-08-07 00:34 — Spud Middleton (not verified)

The real scandal is that she really is a vacuous waste of space who only ever impressed gullible morons cos she was passably attractive, vaguely independently minded and admitted to a 'colourful' past which, in the real world ie. outside of the vapid and conformist standards of the media-political bubble, was a palpable shade of 'beige-vanilla'. She probably looked around her and found that in relative terms she was a full on f**kin Einstein in comparison with her political contemporaries and thought 'f**k this I may as well clean up by giving the odd candid interview and letting my skirt ride a little high on the thigh.'
And good luck to her. And god help the rest of us who have to put up with governance by the self-serving window lickers she leaves in her wake and are served by a media who found her 'interesting'.
Incidentally, if a nuclear catastrophe ever left me and her as the sole remnant of humankind, rest assured the honey badgers would take over the planet as I instantly discovered my 'inner gay' or, failing that, I'd decide I 'd always missed my calling as a Jesuit bull-fighter and I'd expunge out my urges on over ripe water melons or passing sheep.

Tue, 2012-08-07 12:10 — insert name here (not verified)

Was this the article NS bottled out of publishing, replacing, last minute, with the saccharine love fest printed above?

Tue, 2012-08-07 08:17 — Jub Jubs (not verified)

I salute you, sir.

Mon, 2012-08-06 18:53 — hugh markey (not verified)

Most unfair to say Ms Mensch couldn't hack it. [ 'Hack' that word has so many meanings. ]
We are aware of the fact that Mr Murdoch did exactly the same: changed nationalities with aplomb.
Will Louise change her nationality, her very being? Not if we know her. Regular trooper. True Blue to the core.
Some cynical souls have a nagging suspicion she'll go Hollywood. Swop the Union Flag for the Stars and Stripes - just no way Jose.
And on Mrs Thatcher - Louise knows no-one on the Left of Politics believes in any form of capitol punishment. A life sentence will suffice.

Have A NIce Day

Mon, 2012-08-06 13:13 — Keir

Mensch is not our creation. Possibly more than any other, she is entirely the work of the Nasty Party, that is apparently still in cahoots with Murdoch.

Mon, 2012-08-06 13:10 — Alex Baldwin

She made things a bit more interesting, but she was an empty seat intellectually. It's a shame she will never really be nailed on her stone-cold solid-gold hypocrisy on the illegality of drugs.

Mon, 2012-08-06 12:40 — CharlieB (not verified)

It's this sort of daft thinking that gets Boris Johnson elected. It makes me so angry that intelligent, well-considered, mature political journalism is now sorely lacking in this country.

Mon, 2012-08-06 11:15 — ejhchess (not verified)

"We created Louise Mensch: built her up through our desire for someone, somewhere, to say something interesting. And we'll miss her more than she misses us. "

Sure, provided that "we" means the political press, and "the political press" means that section of it which is primarily interested in Westminster and media-based soap opera.

Other people have generally been able to spot Mensch for a cynical and shallow publicity-seeker rather than any kind of serious political individual. Becuase why wouldn't you?

Mon, 2012-08-06 11:26 — Helen Lewis

Like I say in the piece, the press largely reflects what people are interested in - if no one was reading these stories, then they wouldn't get written. It's easy to say "the press are obsessed with her" but inaccurate.

Sun, 2012-08-12 00:53 — Pavlova

No, people read what the press feed them. People outside of London, the media, politics really don't like PR creations, anxsty new dads, Olly and Tullybells, book launches, Sunday Supplement garden suppers and Boden mummies. You're all obsessed with one another, while the rest of us are just killing time flicking through your boring diaries because it's cheaper than buying your boring autobiographies on Amazon.

Mon, 2012-08-06 12:58 — Alex Baldwin

Is this accurate? What is the mechanism by which the press receives feedback on what things their readers are and are not interested in? For print media it must be a nightmare because I imagine most newspapers only ever have a few of their pages read. For websites it's a little easier because of pageviews or comments, but even those aren't really to be trusted (simplest example: some of it is cranked up by spambots).

Mon, 2012-08-06 13:43 — Helen Lewis

Alex - like you say, the internet has made it easier to tell what people are looking at (comments, clicks, social media chatter) but there was always the letters page (and whoever buttonholed the editor in the pub/at the village fete/whatever).

There's also a circular effect whereby everyone has to cover subjects which are everywhere else, because of the worry that if they don't, it will look like laziness/sloppiness/poor news judgement rather than a deliberate decision.

Mon, 2012-08-06 13:52 — Alex Baldwin

I can imagine that in those cases each issue will have a few articles that generate a lot of interest and discussion, and many where the numbers are zero (or at a floor level). Is this handled systematically within publishing organisations? Are there people who actually do research on which articles are more or less popular? Or do they mainly just wing it? (i.e. look to the stats only when they need to back up a particular argument, and then select the numbers they want out of the various metrics)

Mon, 2012-08-06 14:28 — Helen Lewis

Hmm, that's quite a tricky thing to untangle - it depends on *how* big a subject gets - if the issue is really big, then a significant amount of traffic begins to come in from Google searches for keywords. Hence the rash of articles about Samantha Brick after her initial Mail piece - editors knew that people were looking for content about her, and commissioned accordingly.

As for your second point, is there research - yes, there is. At big papers, there will be data distributed around the editorial team of what content was popular the previous day, and what the sources of that traffic were (Google/Twitter/Facebook) and what the keywords were. Further down the "dark arts" route, some sites do "A/B testing" - run the same article with two different headlines - so that they can see which is more clicked.

All of this stuff I find a little worrying - while it's good to see what your audience wants, commissioning led purely by hits could easily end up being stale and unsurprising.

Alex Baldwin (why is the NS site tech so bad?)'s picture

Mon, 2012-08-06 15:17 — Alex Baldwin (why is the NS site tech so bad?) (not verified)

Well, the main problem with this strategy is that you find out which of your things are "popular" (are Daily Mail articles popular when people just share them to hate them? you know the audience for some writers on here is split in the same way) but you don't really know what unexplored areas would be popular if you extended into them, i.e. it encourages conservatism.

Mon, 2012-08-06 17:02 — Herbert (not verified)

This is nonsense. Journalists have a view of what the average punter is inculcated into them by the newsroom culture. It is, of course, a complete fiction. The problem is that then the average punter things she should take the view she is presented as in the media. And the relationship goes back and forth. See also 'human interest', another patronising fiction.

Mon, 2012-08-06 11:14 — Ranter10 (not verified)

This article is proof, if proof was needed that the media see politics & politicians as a source of gossip not information

Mon, 2012-08-06 11:12 — gordon c (not verified)

Para 2 line 6 - I assume you mean CONGER eel? Sheesh.

Mon, 2012-08-06 11:28 — Helen Lewis

Ah yes, I apologise. Something about Boris Johnson makes me think of the conga. Let's not look too deeply into that.

Mon, 2012-08-06 19:31 — gordon c (not verified)

I do see what you mean.....

Mon, 2012-08-06 10:50 — Old Cynic (not verified)

"By resigning mid-parliament, in the quiet August recess"

She's resigned at exactly the point when it will get most political coverage - because there's nothing else going on. This isn't the 1950s, when nobody was in town to write the story, and nobody has used social media more effectively for self-promotion than Mrs Mensch.

The by-election is likely to fall into that period just after the conferences when the political atmosphere is at its most shrill, and her party has got no chance of defending the seat. The consequences of this will reverberate for some time.