Marie Le Conte Parliament’s gossip girl on the secrets of reporting from the Westminster bubble Written by Lydia Spencer-Elliott
says Le Conte. But not everyone can employ that tactic and still feel safe. “There are very talented journalists who just don’t really go out in Westminster as a result. They don’t want to be there after dark; they don’t want to have drinks one on one with men. You can’t blame them, but it does make the job a lot harder. “Weirdly, I’ve found newsrooms to be more maledominated than politics. Both are pretty incestuous and without management training, both journalism and politics can wind up being quite dysfunctional.” To her surprise, Le Conte once discovered she was having an affair with an MP: “I thought it was hysterical, but also slightly disturbing. What kind of annoyed me was I hadn’t done anything dumb, but everyone seemed to think I had. Part of me thought, Jesus fucking Christ, I should have fucked an MP. If you’re going to get a bad reputation for doing something, then you might as well have been doing it.” She wrinkles her forehead after this final statement as the words linger in a pregnant pause between us. She concedes and shrugs defiantly. Judging by the rolling political sex scandals journalists uncover, her rash philosophy aligns with those in the Westminster bubble. Yet, with such high stakes, it is >>
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ouse of Commons hearsay is more influential than any press statement or policy paper. This is the revelation that Marie Le Conte proved in September with her debut novel Haven’t You Heard? Gossip, Power and How Politics Really Works. “People think Westminster is like House of Cards but it’s actually more like Mean Girls,” an anonymous MP told Marie. “People come in expecting to be Francis Urquhart but they’re just Regina George. There’s a lot of Regina Georges in Parliament.” If the MPs are Regina, then Le Conte is Gretchen Wieners — her swept quiff is full of secrets. Where she works is one such secret. Since going freelance, the café we meet in has become her office and she prefers to keep the location classified. Of French-Moroccan heritage, Marie moved to London in 2009 to study journalism at the University of Westminster. After a stint as an Evening Standard diarist, she became a Buzzfeed political correspondent but resigned in 2017: “I like writing features about politics and that’s not really a job that exists, so I went freelance. I had to realise that I just do not have a brain for news. I drove my editor mad because a big story would come out and I’d go: ‘Oh! I’ve known about that for weeks.’ He’d be sat at his desk crushing his can of coke into his hand.” Today, she is busily working on a profile of Home Secretary, Priti Patel, for Vice. But her subject’s solitariness means none of her sources are working out. “She doesn’t seem to have any friends,” frets Le Conte as she taps her pointily manicured nails against the table. True to her days as a diary reporter, Le Conte recruited her sources at Westminster parties and pubs. “I have no shame about it,” she says cheerfully, “I used to drink the cheapest lager but last month I discovered tequila and tonic. It’s amazing.” Drinking will inevitably encourage loose lips, but Le Conte warns against immediately turning conversation into interrogation when in a social scenario. “Just have a fucking chat like a normal person,” she advises. “Lots of it is like speed dating. You have to find similarities to establish that relationship.” Unfortunately for female reporters this is more literal than metaphorical. “Especially when I was starting out, a fair few politicians thought going for one drink to talk about work was a date” she says. “We would chat and then I’d get a message afterwards saying ‘I had such a lovely time, see you again very soon I hope xxx’. “I just ignore it. That’s how I solve most of my problems,”