Louise Daphne Mensch (née Bagshawe; born 28 June 1971) is a British blogger, novelist, and former Conservative Member of Parliament. In the 1990s she became known as a writer of chick lit novels under her maiden name Louise Bagshawe. She was elected Conservative MP for Corby at the 2010 UK general election.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. 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".
