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Beauty by Louise Mensch (Headline, £13.99)

As Louise Bagshawe, Louise Mensch published some 15 chicklit novels, running from Career Girls in 1995 to Destiny in 2011. Then from 2010 to 2012, she was Conservative MP for Corby, having been parachuted in through David Cameron’s A-list of starry candidates. However, she quit in August 2012, moving to New York to be with her second husband, Peter Mensch, the manager of Metallica and Red Hot Chili Peppers, to whom, curiously enough, she had dedicated her very first novel, so many years earlier. In the resulting by-election, Labour recovered her seat.

Now here’s her first post-Parliament fiction, under her married name this time, and again dedicated to “Peter, my ideal of beauty”. It’s illuminatingly crude.

Dina Kane is an unwanted second child, born to loser parents, her mother silly and selfish, her father a construction worker in New York who drunkenly falls to his death. But Dina is incredibly beautiful and incredibly driven to succeed, come what may. She is Louise Mensch’s idea of a heroine, or, you might as well say, Louise Mensch’s idea of Louise Mensch.

Dina soon breaks free of her family and starts making her fortune in Manhattan with incredible rapidity, scrambling up the property ladder and revolutionising every business she touches, cafés first, then beauty products. It seems nothing can stop this supremely talented, hard-working and beautiful girl from ascending to riches and glory in no time.

But a bad man tries. Spoilt, sadistic Edward tricks Dina, still a naïve virgin, into having sex with him and then he dumps her. When she vengefully humiliates him and his family, he vows to destroy her — and duly does his worst for the rest of the book.

Dina turns to an alpha male for help. Joel Gaines, 41, is “one of Wall Street’s major mavericks … a brutal player” and Mensch’s dream man. “He was sexy. His eyes were dark, fringed with black lashes so thick it looked like he was wearing mascara. He had a large nose and a cruel, arrogant set to his mouth, which matched his aura of power and the muscles of his body. She flashed to imagining him in a gym, lifting weights.”

Joel is married but no matter. He and Dina are made for each other. We know this, because the novel proceeds by describing alternately Dina’s beauty, and then Joel’s power, and the arousing effect it has on her.

“Tonight she had paid attention to her beauty … she looked almost Egyptian, like a supermodel …” Another time, she has “a sun-kissed look … as though she would be heading to a yacht on the Mediterranean, any second.” Another time, “the regal style of a Greek goddess”.

And Joel’s alpha maleness sure does it for her. “Dina felt herself moisten with desire. He was so arrogant, so handsome, so cocky.” We’re repeatedly told about his effect on her “belly” — “that squirming lick of desire trawling across her belly”. Trawling? Perhaps a misprint for “crawling”. Or perhaps not.

It is repeatedly specified that it is his dominance that works this magic. “Gaines was the kind of man other men feared and envied, and it turned her on to see them scurry and scuttle about him.” That’s nice, isn’t it?

And it is Mensch’s own fantasy, we can be sure, for in her blog Unfashionista, she has volunteered as much: “I like strong men, alpha males.” Again: “Look, guys, I’m as enlightened as the next chick but there really is a need for dominant males in the world. For your alphas, your muscular, ambitious, driven, ass-kicking commandos …” So there we are, guys, way to go. Brutality, cruelty, arrogance, strength. It’s not much of a political programme, perhaps? But then again, maybe it is and we are well spared it.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £15.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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