Louise Mensch has an uncanny ability to land herself in the centre of a scandal

Louise Mensch has been hacked by the Russians. Or so she believes. Before I arrive at her brownstone mansion on New York’s Upper West Side she warns me to look out for a strategically placed mobile florist in her road. She is half joking, but Mensch is pretty sure she’s been the victim of a “man in the middle” attack.

This is when a hacker puts themselves in the middle of your online communications. You think you’re talking to someone directly, but in fact it’s going through a third party.

“God knows when,” she says, but she’s pretty sure it happened, and points out that such an attack requires the hackers to have a physical presence nearby, thus the mobile florist.

It sounds a bit