- The Observer, Sunday 12 July 2009
Touring with thrash metal bands, churning out spicy bonkbusters and joining the Labour party are not the most obvious steps on the career ladder of the aspiring Tory MP, but for former Sony Records employee Louise Bagshawe, being a bestselling author and Conservative parliamentary candidate are far from incompatible.
"When I went to the Tories to apply for the list, I didn't expect them to have heard of me," she says, speaking from her home in the village of Lowick, Northants. "I said: 'Look, I've sold 2 million books to British women, I know how to speak to women and maybe you need somebody in your party who can relate to women.'"
But she is quick to point out that she is not such an anomaly as she was painted by the press when her name first appeared on David Cameron's "A-list". "It was a big story about having minor celebrities on the list, by which they meant me, Zac Goldsmith and Adam Rickitt from Coronation Street. All of a sudden, I was being portrayed as this blond chick-lit dilettante who'd just discovered an interest in politics. It was very frustrating because no one wanted to hear the rest of the story or dig any deeper into my CV."
In fact, Bagshawe joined the Conservative party in her teens and put in hours of door-knocking and stuffing envelopes, before the "in-fighting, general incompetence and moralising" of the Major government pushed her towards Tony Blair's reinvented Labour party.
"I really hated 'Back to Basics'," she says. "I can't stand politicians preaching about personal morality, and I thought, 'Tony Blair is a Tory, I'm joining the Labour party.' Even my heroine, Margaret Thatcher, said: 'Mr Blair is not a socialist,' which was as close as a royal stamp of approval from my point of view." Her defection lasted only a few months.
"I didn't think that with my past and my books there was any way I could ever be a Tory MP," she says, laughing, but the decisive moment came after David Cameron was elected, when she was invited to speak at the Oxford Union alongside Oliver Letwin, who then offered to be her referee.
She has a refreshingly undaunted attitude towards the perennial difficulty of balancing work and family. She shares the care of her three children, aged two, four and five, with her ex-husband, American property developer Anthony LoCicero, and is proud to have raised them without a nanny while maintaining two careers - a pattern she intends to continue if she is elected next year. "You can't dwell too much on life's problems," she says, briskly, "because then you wouldn't do anything, you'd just learn paralysis. You have to think it will work itself out."
Asked if she is confident about the party's and her own chances of victory next year, she grows circumspect. "If these last few months have taught us anything, it's that the cliche that a week is a long time in politics is 100% true. Anything could happen between now and the next election. All I can do is work as hard as I can and repay the faith that people have placed in me." Then she adds, emphatically, "never allow your self-worth to be caught up in your job, because you can always be sacked from your job, but you yourself remain."
