New Girl Louise Bagshawe, who rates Jeffrey Archer as ‘by far the greatest writer’ of popular fiction

The eldest of four children, at 18 she went up to Christ Church, Oxford, where she rubbed shoulders with George Osborne and Jo Johnson, both now fellow Tory MPs, and was secretary of the Oxford Union. Some contemporaries found her unflaggingly opinionated manner rather wearisome. At the age of 22, after brief stints as a press officer for EMI and a marketing manager for Sony Records, she signed a contract with a publisher and has been scribbling ever since.

Her 14 bonkbusters have titles like Sparkles, Glitz, Passion and When She Was Bad, and mainly trouble the literary pages of Heat magazine. Her latest, Desire, appeared last month. “In newspaper terms,” she says of her output, “it’s like combining the story interest of the Daily Mail with the sex and shopping of the News of the World.” It’s a tribute to her particular brand of feminism that she is happy for younger members of the sisterhood to wallow in these fantasies when they should, surely, be raising their consciousness.

Archer Sickof’im?
Writing has made her rich, if not quite as flush as the other Tory best-seller, Jeffrey Archer. One friend recalls that, aged 25, she took Archer’s biographer Michael Crick to tea at Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair to remonstrate with him for his “unfair treatment” of one of her favourite authors and political heroes. Never having met Crick before, Bagshawe at least paid the bill. And, to her credit, she apologised to him for her lapse in judgement after Jeff was jailed for perjury. But the bigger lapse of judgment endures: she still reveres Archer as “by far the greatest” writer of popular fiction and reckons that Kane and Abel “will probably never be bettered as the ultimate blockbuster of all time”.

In 1996 she briefly defected to Labour, on the grounds that Tony Blair was really a Tory. (What swung it was Lady Thatcher’s remark that “Mr Blair is not a socialist”, which to Louise seemed like a royal warrant.) The flirtation didn’t last long. Within months she was back in the Conservative fold canvassing for her mother, Daphne, who won a seat on East Sussex county council in 1997.

‘Pseuds and Posers’
Bagshawe’s was one of the first names to appear on the Conservative A-list, David Cameron’s attempt to bully Tory shires into selecting metropolitan smoothies and glamourpusses. One Tory MP complained that local campaigners were being shoved out by “beautiful people”; another muttered that parachuting in minor celebs such as Bagshawe was “the bizarre theory of people who spend too much time with the pseuds and posers of London's chichi set and not enough time in normal Britain”. Still, the Tories of Corby obediently adopted her in October 2006.

Moving to live in the area finished her marriage to New York-based property speculator Anthony LoCicero, but did allow her to campaign non-stop and turn Labour’s 1,500 majority into a Tory lead of 1,950.

Fame has already worked to her advantage at Westminster, where she was voted on to the culture and media select committee in June. It remains to be seen what the people of Corby, with its large Scottish community, make of Bagshawe’s lust-fuelled literary style. Perhaps they’ll never find out: with a 103 percent rise in claims for jobseeker’s allowance over the course of the last parliament, it seems unlikely that many constituents will be wasting their pennies on Desire.