So the press have dug around into Louise Mensch MP’s past and discovered, shock horror, that she ‘probably’ took some drugs at a nightclub when she was in her twenties. Why this is news is frankly beyond me but why this has come out now, is not. The press are doing their thing, taking on someone that has taken them on. The ‘probably’ is a bit of a give away. There are lots of ‘probablys’ floating around the News of the World scandal. True or not, a ‘probably’ can hurt.
In the case of Louise Mensch I doubt it will hurt that much for that long because she had the good sense to own up to it in a way that takes the sting out of it. Obama did the same when he was accused of taking drugs in his youth. Lots of people take drugs in their youth and some into their older youth so it’s not the vote loser that people may assume it is. Not that I’m going to necessarily talk about that. What I am interested in is the effect that this sort of press coverage has on people who might have been considering becoming an MP.
My friends tell me that no sane person wants to be an MP in this country and I have to say, there is some sense to that claim. The British public really doesn’t like its elected representatives. MPs are the second least trusted group of people in the country, just slightly more than journalists, which in this day and age is really saying something. (Not all journalists are bad, I know, I know). Who, in their right mind would want to play a role that is this hated?
Not only that, but when I ask women to come forward to stand as MPs lots of them say no and refer to the treatment that they might expect from the press, treatment a lot like Louise Mensch is experiencing today. They worry about their past and how that might impact on their families. It takes a brave woman to want to air her dirty laundry in public. We know that female politicians get treated differently from male politicians in scandals. Remember when Liz Truss, Tory hopeful was almost deselected from running for Parliament after having an affair? Some might think this was an appropriate response from the party but you only have to look at the fact it was a Tory MP she had the affair with, who quite happily kept his place. Is there a double standard? Yes indeed.
Good on Louise Mensch. She’s essentially saying, ‘Yes I’ve had a life. So what?’ I agree. Isn’t that what we want? To elect people to lead us who have lived? People that have had jobs outside of politics, who know what it is to battle with life, those that have experienced money worries, maybe even battled with addiction. People who know how relationships can go wrong and the work needed to keep them going. People that have allowed themselves to veer from the carefully crafted story of who and what a politician is, a story that can only end in disappointment for the voters because we are all human, full of fragilities and vulnerabilities. It’s a sham to pretend otherwise.
Let’s select and elect more human beings please. And let’s not sit quietly as the press dig around in peoples lives, bringing up stuff that frankly just doesn’t matter.
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37 Comments
But her comment also said how stupid and dangerous it was… So would she vote for legalisation and let people make up their own mind, or is she saying – as so very many Tories have said before her – ‘Yes I’ve had a life… But if you plebs do the same, you should be locked up’?
Just checked. No, we absolutely shouldn’t praise her – yet another hypocrite who says others should be locked up for what she did (and wasn’t locked up for): http://twitter.com/LouiseMensch/status/96940742492176384
Guido publishes her full exchange with the journalist:
http://order-order.com/2011/07/29/how-to-handle-a-story/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+guidofawkes+%28Guy+Fawkes%27+blog+of+parliamentary+plots%2C+rumours+and+conspiracy%29
Alex made the point I was going to make.
It is really a question of hypocracy. The problem with the press which is fair to raise and where I agree with you is that they don’t care about that, they want any newstory that will sell them newspapers, and one very effective way to do that is to humiliate someone. Now that is offputting to both men and women.
Hmm. I think she handled it well. What would have liked her to say about the drugs? What else could she say?
She should/could have said “yes I took drugs in the past, and if the subject comes up in parliament I will use my experience AND common sense on the issue, not the cant , stupidity and outright hypocrisy that dominates this issue”
As Alex has pointed out, if she has “messed with her brain” can we now trust her judgement on this or any other issue?
“What else could she say?”
That a fuller debate on the subject is required.
I think aside from anything else, where maybe 1-in-5 people in the country are put in the frame as law-breakers the practicality and effectiveness of those laws is brought into question.
How can anyone say we are a country which supports law and order when the law is flouted with such total disregard?
The law is not being enforced consistently because it is out of proportion with society – while the results of the law remain so then lawmakers remain out of touch with society and they put law enforcers in a position of ridicule.
…and when law-enforcers are made ridiculous by their political masters it’s no wonder that problems like phone-hacking and financial mismanagement build up.
Lee………for one I agree with you on both major points……yes, it’s good to hear of a human response rather than the stock answer…….and we do need our lawmakers and decision makers to have had a life so that the impact of their decisions can be better understood before they are taken.
It did leave me wondering whether in a bygone age (like a month ago) she would have had to get a new mobile phone!
If somebody takes drugs, gets caught and gets a conviction then they would not become an MP. However, they can take drugs, not get convicted and become an MP, then they can say they oppose drugs and support users being criminalised so they can’t become MPs, as Mensch suggests.
She’s not a hero, she’s a hypocrite of the sort that supports the ruining of the lives of others for things that they themselves have done – everything that is wrong with today’s political class.
Well I think she handled it admirably.
However there are far more serious allegations which she needs to address.
I understand that her fellow MP Jacob Rees-Mogg was at Oxford University at the same time as her and insists that he had only ever witnessed her enjoying a “small glass of sherry”.
That’s the sort of accusation she may find it impossible to live down.
When she took the drugs, did she believe they should be illegal? If not then she should be campaigning against them being illegal. However she stood on a platform for the Conservative party which is more inclined to make the laws even more draconian. Why does she think that she has the right to break the law, but as a member of the government that has never dissented against it’s drug policy, not other people?
I was at Oxford University at the same time as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Louise Bagshawe (as she then was). I never tried sherry myself and was more into Ruddles County. It is perfectly possible for an MP to say that s/he broke the law and took illegal drugs when s/he was younger, that s/he now regrets it and that she still thinks that such drugs should be illegal. That is not hypocritical. When I was fourteen, I was probably as annoyingly noisy on buses as some fourteen-year-olds are today. I therefore admit that I indulged in behaviour (i.e. noisiness on buses) that I would now encourage others not to indulge in. Does that make me a hypocrite?
Incidentally, re:- the suggestion that women are treated differently from men in scandals – not sure I buy that. Had Ms Truss been a man, and had he had an affair with a female Tory MP under identical circumstances, I’m not sure that the outcome would have been any different.
We say that the press is much more prurient about politicians’ private lives than it used to be, but I wonder. Various people (male and female) have come through scandals in the last year or two that would once have finished them off.
Matthew Harris, it is not hypocritical to change your opinion on drugs. It is hypocritical to support policies that would prevent someone who is in a situation you were once in from having your success simply because they got caught and you didn’t.
Being caught being noisy on a bus would not prevent you from becoming an MP, getting charged with drugs offences likely would.
@ g – Very well put. To maintain her integrity and intellectual consistency, shouldn’t she now go down to her local police station, confess to her crimes, and ask them to prosecute her? That is what she wants to happen to other people who commit the same offence.
@ Matthews – in some way we have a bit of a duty to think of our own past indiscretions before sounding off about what should happen to those who did similar things. In Louise Mensch’s case, it’s a question of asking herself whether it would have helped her, or society, if she had been arrested and prosecuted at the time.
Iain Sharpe, to be fair to Mensch I’m wondering if her subsequent clarification of opinion on drugs wasn’t suggested by her party.
As an aside, I’m a bit concerned about the number of MPs and parliamentary candidates, on all sides, who seem to have no experience of drugs, not so much the taking of, but simply being around people who have used drugs in a social context. It seems astonishing to me that such inexperience and naivety could be rewarded with a political career. Like having MPs with no understanding of what it is to live on benefits, be disabled, an ethnic minority or even state educated…
“g” is looking at this through the wrong end of the telescope.
You write: “It is hypocritical to support policies that would prevent someone who is in a situation you were once in from having your success simply because they got caught and you didn’t.”
Are you really saying that it is “hypocritical” for anyone who has ever used illegal drugs (without getting ‘caught’) to believe that use of some drugs should remain illegal?
You write: “As an aside, I’m a bit concerned about the number of MPs and parliamentary candidates, on all sides, who seem to have no experience of drugs, not so much the taking of, but simply being around people who have used drugs in a social context.”
What is your evidence that there are many candidates and MPs who have not been around people who sometimes use illegal drugs?
You write: “It seems astonishing to me that such inexperience and naivety could be rewarded with a political career.”
I have never met anyone who has been “rewarded with a political career”; the only politicians that I have ever met have been people who have to fight hard to have a political career. Even those individuals who start from a relatively privileged starting-point have had to fight to succeed in politics.
You write: “Like having MPs with no understanding of what it is to live on benefits, be disabled, an ethnic minority or even state educated…”
I am an RP-talking white male who grew up in a posh part of London and went to Oxford University. I have also had some experience of living on benefits, am defined by law as being a member of an ethnic minority (and was once assaulted after complaining about racist graffiti targeted at that minority) and was state-educated at a comprehensive school. When I was at school, I was told that I had a hand/eye co-ordination problem and thus had extra time in exams; although this is not actually a disability and is no longer a factor in my life, it surely means that have an understanding of all the things that you accuse many MPs of having no understanding of.
Yet, if ‘g’ met me, I bet s/he’d assume that I was exactly the sort of posh white Oxbridge bloke in a suit who has ‘no understanding’ of these things.
If someone (not me, but people more generally) is clever, sensitive and able to empathise with other people, then they can represent relatively disadvantaged people without having themselves lived the lives of those people. For example, an intelligent person can understand what it is like to subsist on benefits and be unemployed, even if they have never experienced it themselves.
@:Mathew Harris “For example, an intelligent person can understand what it is like to subsist on benefits and be unemployed, even if they have never experienced it themselves.”
As Einstein said, “all knowledge is experience, everything else is just information”.
What any of your points have got to do with the drug debate (or much else) is beyond me.
PS That’s why when I left my council estate I decided on Cambridge rather than the other place.
Matthew,
the power of experience versus the power of imagination makes an interesting debate with strong points to be made on both sides, however I’d say good leadership on an issue requires a balance of emphasis rather than all of one and none of the other – and that in this instance because Louise Mensch hasn’t shown how she reconciles her past behaviour with her current opinion she has lain herself wide open to accusations of inconsistency (or hypocrisy for the less generous).
In other words she should’ve done so much more if she were to be deserving of praise from a liberal perspective, but in keeping with her stated support for the status quo on this issue and her rejection of the need to debate the issues more fully (understandable given her own potentially conflicted position) she shows why she is a Conservative and therefore why we are not.
Given the state of opinion polls and constant calls to put more distance between the coalition partners she couldn’t be more deserving of praise from party figures within the LibDems!
@Matthew Harris
It’s quite clear you don’t understand g’s point. There is a clear difference from ‘playing up on a bus’ and having done something criminal and then supporting its criminalisation as an MP without having faced the appropriate punishment under law for undertaking that criminal act.
If you have taken drugs and support their criminalisation as an intellectual standpoint, that is a condescending and usually patronising position to take, but it’s not hypocritical.
What is hypocritical is supporting the continued illegality of an illegal action whilst having broken the law on this matter without having faced the music yourself. If you are prepared to support the criminalisation of something that you yourself have done, then you must also be prepared to support your own criminilastion. Or else you are a hypocrite.
Additionally if you acted up on buses when you were 14, and then spend your time whining about 14 year olds acting up on buses, then you are a hypocrite. The fact that you did it a long time ago doesn’t make you less of a hypocrite.
In that situation I think it’s fine to be against 14 year olds acting up on buses, but you lose the right to lecture them about it. Try doing something which doesn’t require leading by example and behaving responsibly (i.e. not an MP, I would hope).
“She’s essentially saying, ‘Yes I’ve had a life. So what?’ I agree. Isn’t that what we want? To elect people to lead us who have lived? ”
Fine,but why should these people ‘who have had a life’ then get to criminalise people who ‘have lives’? In what way is that legitimate?
The thing is, here you are apparently supporting people taking drugs as ‘having a life’. Well, personally I don’t think you need to do anything illegal to ‘have a life’ but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that you are glorifying the fact that our politicians take drugs whilst simultaneously supporting their right to tell us that we, the public, shouldn’t take drugs.
I suppose it’s coz we’re all stoopid and didn’t go to Oxbridge, and therefore aren’t intelligent enough to make decisions about these matters for ourselves. Innit?
There is a difference between being a hypocrite, and being someone who changes their mind. Someone who, aged sixteen, used to hang around with other kids at a bus stop, throwing drinks cans at buses, etc, was arguably breaking the law. A person who behaved in that way as a kid (which I didn’t) could, twenty years later, understand why such behaviour was wrong and so want it to be illegal today, without being a hypocrite. Lots of people (again, not me) used ecstasy on the night club dance drug scene when they were teenagers twenty years ago. They were committing a criminal offence. If those same people now think that ecstasy should continue to be illegal, then that does not make them hypocrites – it makes them people who are able to reflect maturely on their own behaviour when they were very young people.
“If those same people now think that ecstasy should continue to be illegal, then that does not make them hypocrites – it makes them people who are able to reflect maturely on their own behaviour when they were very young people”
It makes them hypocrites if they still refuse to face the legal penalty for that illegal action 20 years ago.
If you have broken the law but not faced the law, then you don’t have the right to make the law.
I don’t care that Mensch took drugs or that she writes rubbish novels, what I’m wondering is why she was wasting an golden opportunity to question Murdoch about News Corp by throwing him bones about their competitors all being just as bad.
“…if they still refuse to face the legal penalty for that illegal action 20 years ag”
Have you heard of the statute of limitations?
Matthew Harris,
I am an RP-talking white male who grew up in a posh part of London and went to Oxford University
As are most people in parliament, yet they are a minority in this country. Most of them believe that they speak for the common man or woman too.
I hate to tell you this, but most of them are hopelessly out of touch and represent a sector of society which should have far less representation in any powerful body, elected or otherwise.
Rob,
If you have broken the law but not faced the law, then you don’t have the right to make the law.
and this was why Jack Straw had to take his own son to the police when he was caught offering drugs to a journalist. It might have not been the best thing to do as a parent, but as a lawmaker, and home secretary, it was the only thing he could do if he wished to maintain any authority.
Actually, around a third of MPs went to Oxbridge, so it is not true that “most people in Parliament” are from that background. A third is not “most people”. Incidentally, nine out of ten MPs went to university, which is massively disproportionate compared to the population as a whole. Would you also like to see a reduction in the number of MPs who went to university at all? That is the logic in what you are saying.
Matthew Harris,
I stand by my concern that there are far too many people of your background in parliament
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/increase-in-number-of-mps-from-private-schools-1970414.html
I have no wish to see fewer university educated MPs, although an increased diversity of subject away from PPE and Law is desirable, as educational achievement is often a marker of (some) ability. I would like to see fewer people from a wealthy or privately educated background as money buys achievement beyond ability and people from this background are often woefully ignorant of how the other 97% live.
.
@Rob: The courts and prosecuting authorities in this country are not interested in pursuing people over petty misdemeanours committed 20 years ago, and that is a good thing (to do so would be a waste of public money, and not in the public interest). So Ms Mensch is not “refusing to face the legal penalty” over what she might have done as a younger woman, as there is no legal penalty for her to face, there is no way for her to face the law over it. Do you really want the UK to be like Poland, pursuing people even across borders for every piddling little offence however long ago it was?
Alex McFie
Do you really want the UK to be like Poland, pursuing people even across borders for every piddling little offence however long ago it was?
If it’s a piddling little offence then why does it exclude you from many jobs, including, it seems, becoming an MP? Surely your argument that it should have no long term consequences is therefore an argument for decriminalisation? Which is exactly the argument people are demanding that Mensch make instead of her hypocritical guff.
g: It does not seem to have excluded people from becoming an MP, as there have been MPs who have admitted to drug-taking in their youth. And the reason the authorities don’t pursue people over petty offences committed long ago is not that these offences have no long term consequences or that they should be decriminalized: they would probably take the same attitude over someone with an otherwise clean record who is alleged to have stolen a bicycle 20 years ago. It’s a question of whether it is worth spending the time and effort gathering the evidence (when much of it will have disappeared and people will not remember the events) and making a case against the accused, compared to the seriousness of the offence.
The police are quite welcome to quiz Ms Mensch over 20-year-old drug allegations if they wish to do so. Somehow I doubt they will bother.
Alex MacFie,
t does not seem to have excluded people from becoming an MP, as there have been MPs who have admitted to drug-taking in their youth.
The argument is that there are no MPs with drugs convictions, only MPs lucky enough not to be caught. A conviction would result in parliament not being an available career option. hence the accusations of hypocrisy.
g: However, as I have pointed out, the hypocrisy charge does not stand up because facing the law over her “probable” 20-year-old drug-use incident almost certainly ISN’T AN OPTION. It seems rather unfair to brand someone a hypocrite for failing to do something that they are not actually able to do through no fault of their own. If you do wish to do so, then I can only assume that you actually want to live in a society where the law continues to pursue people for unpunished 20-year-old petty misdemeanours, rather than focusing on serious and/or current crimes.
@Matthew Harris: Question: should Mrs Mensch be punished today for taking drugs ten years ago? Another question: should an “urban youth” be punished today, for taking drugs last week?
mpg: These are both valid questions, but they relate to separate issues.