The Northamptonshire Telegraph today exclusively revealed the shock resignation of local Conservative MP Louise Mensch.
The paper’s reporter Katie Cronin reported that Mensch decided to quit because she found it ‘difficult to juggle family responsibilities with her political career”.
The Corby and East Northamptonshire MP told the paper she was “completely devastated” but had decided to move to New York with her three children to live with her husband.
The Telegraph reported: ‘An official announcement will be made nationally at 10am today but Mrs Mensch wanted her constituents to be the first to know of her resignation.”
Mensch recently launched her own social networking site called menshn.com as a rival to twitter. The Telegraph suggested that she is ‘now expected to concentrate on building the popularity of the site”.
As a member of the Select Committee for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Mensch played a prominent role in its investigations into phone-hacking at the News of the World.
She was, however, highly critical of the committee’s final report released in May, claiming it would be ‘correctly seen as a partisan report and will have lost a very great deal of its credibility”.
In April, Mensch called for more subsidies and tax advantages for local newspapers as a means of preserving the UK’s ‘most popular print media”.
Mensch began raising awareness of the issues facing the local press after Johnston Press announced that two daily newspapers in her constituency, the Northampton Chronicle and Echo and Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph, were being converted to weeklies.
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