“If I had to sum up Corby in a single word, pride is the one I would use.” So said Louise Bagshawe – now Mensch – in her maiden speech to Parliament. Two years later, with Mensch having left Northamptonshire for New York and a by-election called for this week, that word, pride, is absent when I meet with two young Corbyites to chat about their former MP.
“She was voted in off the back of people demanding change – Phil Hope was caught up in the expenses scandal – but we never saw that,” says Patrick Tierney, a 22-year-old politics graduate born and raised in the town. “From day one, people saw that she wasn’t committed. She seemed distant, and then for her to be so visible in the media, that didn’t go down too well. You’d overhear conversations in the pub or at the bus stop, people saying, ‘What does she think she’s doing? She’s a laughing stock’. She’d use buzzwords on Twitter, talk about Corby’s Scottish heritage, but when it came down to the nitty gritty there wasn’t much of a connection made.”
Liam Keith, a 27-year-old who works at the local video shop in town, agrees. “For a backbench MP that nobody had heard of before, she became very famous, very quickly. She was on Have I Got News For You and embarrassed herself a bit sitting next to Jonny Rotten on Question Time, but there was never any mention of what she was actually doing for Corby,” he says. “I followed her on Twitter. She always talked about ‘Corby Pride’, but she didn’t really understand the people of the town.”
“I never once saw her in the flesh,” he adds. “Most people feel that she was very much only here when she had to be.” This feeling of disconnection runs deep through Corby. One of David Cameron’s A-list candidates, Mensch, Oxford graduate, author of chick lit and prolific user of Twitter, was, you feel, always going to find it hard to fully relate to a working class new town built on heavy industry and hard work. High youth unemployment and yet more job losses at the steelworks this January didn’t help her cause either. Her resignation has aroused suspicions about why she became an MP in the first place. “She used Corby as a stepping stone, used it well to publicise herself,” Liam tells me. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s got a new book out by the end of the year.”
When she resigned from her seat in August, Mensch said she was doing so for family reasons. Yet in a recent interview with The Sunday Times Magazine, her husband, the rock band manager Peter Mensch, said that his wife had stood down because “she thought…she’d get killed in the next election.” Mensch has denied this, but the fact remains that she has left a key marginal seat, midway through Parliament, with a slender majority of just 1,951. Labour are ready to pounce. “Ed Miliband was straight over here as soon as she resigned. I’ve had two people canvassing my door in the last week – they were Labour, both times,” says Keith. This push seems to be working – everyone I spoke to in the town said they were going to vote Labour.
The people I spoke to in Corby – proud, hardworking and down to earth – feel duped and used by Mensch’s time in office. They were hoping for a young, dynamic MP who would serve their interests well in parliament. The reality, many feel, was a lot different. On the day news of her resignation was made public, Mensch took to Twitter: “It has been an incredible honour serving the people of #CorbyEN.” The feeling, according to Keith, is not mutual. “People wouldn’t miss her now she’s gone.”
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