Mystery surrounds journalist who asked Tory MP about drug-taking shortly after she spoke out on phone hacking
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Louise Mensch tweeted from Florida that she has hired a City PR firm to help her handle questions about her past. Photograph: Nadav Kander
Tom Steiner, a financial PR consultant at Capital MSL, had a busy afternoon.
Steiner, who tweets as @Tom__Ace, has been hired by the Conservative MP and author Louise Mensch to help her as she deals with questions from a mystery journalist about her colourful past.
On 22 July Mensch received an email, signed by David Jones Investigative Journalists, asking her to answer questions about her time working at EMI when she was in her 20s. Paul Owen reproduced the email from David Jones who asked Mensch, 40, whether she had taken drugs with the violinist Nigel Kennedy at Ronnie Scott's in Birmingham.
Mensch, who has been tweeting today from her family holiday in Florida, decided to humour the journalist by issuing a press release with the help of Steiner with a full and amusing confession. "This sounds highly probable," she wrote of allegations that she took drugs.
Mensch clearly believes that the email was prompted by remarks she made at the House of Commons culture select committee on 19 July when Rupert and James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks gave evidence. The author, who first made her name as the "chick-lit" author Louise Bagshawe, was forced to apologise to Piers Morgan today after she used parliamentary privilege at the Murdoch hearing to link the CNN presenter and former Daily Mirror editor to phone hacking. Mensch interpreted a passage in Morgan's book, The Insider, as an admission of guilt when it fact he was describing his fears about how he may have been a victim of the practice.
But the question at the end of another busy day for members of the culture select committee, who are deeply irritated with Mensch, is: who is David Jones? He appears not to be the veteran Daily Mail journalist of the same name who is busy reporting the aftermath of the Norway shootings. The paper is understood to have established that the email had nothing to do with him.
Over at the FT Westminster blog Jim Pickard wrote:
Who are "David Jones Investigative Journalists"? Why don't they come up in Google? And why has this broken on the same day that Mensch's apology letter to Morgan made it into the public domain?
A short while later Pickard added this:
UPDATE: Mensch's PR man tells me that David Jones emailed from "davidjones1232@gmail.com". Meanwhile there are no records of David Jones Investigative Journalists at Companies House.
Perhaps we should take a look at the chronology over the past week:
19 July: At the Murdoch hearing at the culture select committee Mensch links Piers Morgan to phone hacking.
21 July: Sly Bailey, chief executive of Trinity Mirror, writes to John Whittingdale, chairman of the commons culture select committee, to point out that Mensch had misunderstood Morgan's book.
22 July at 7.34pm: David Jones Investigative Journalists sends the email to Mensch with three questions about her time working at EMI.
22 July: Mensch's PR adviser, Tom Steiner, retweets this from Sky News:
Chris Bryant MP writes to News Corporation non-executive directors requesting suspension of Rupert and James Murdoch
29 July at 11.00am: Mensch sends out a press release with her response to the questions from David Jones.
29 July at 2.06pm: The House of Commons culture select committee releases a series of letters. These include a letter from Mensch to its chairman John Whittingdale, dated 29 July, apologising to Piers Morgan.
No doubt Mensch will be keen to discover the true identity of David Jones who has not replied to an email I sent him. Tom Steiner, who told me Mensch had hired him so that staff in her constituency office in Corby would not be burdened by questions about her past at EMI, says that David Jones has not been in touch. The journalist appears to be unmoved that Mensch handed his scoop to the world.