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Mark Menzies, the MP for Fylde near Blackpool in Lancashire, has few political friends at the moment (at least publicly) as he deals with allegations over whether he misused campaign funds to pay off "bad people" in what appears to be one of the more extraordinary alleged scandals in Westminster.
But there was a time when Menzies was seen as hot political property with a bright future in front of him in the Conservatives and he even attracted the attention of the Labour Party.
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When he was first elected in 2010, Menzies appeared to be on the verge of great things with a potential high-flying ministerial career ahead of him.
But there was something about him which irked the new crop of Scottish Labour MPs who had also first entered the Commons in the same election.
Menzies is a working-class Scot brought up by a single mother (his father died a month before he was born) in Ayrshire, a traditional Labour heartland. To the mind of a number of Scottish Labour MPs, Menzies should have been one of them, not a Tory.
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READ MORE: Tory MP allegedly demanded campaign cash to pay ‘bad people’ thousands of pounds
Menzies was on Cameron's A-list of candidates in 2010 (Image: Getty)
The 2010 election had resulted in an enormous turnover of MPs with many retiring and Gordon Brown's Labour government being replaced by the Tory/Lib Dem coalition government under David Cameron and Nick Clegg.
In the early days after the election there was a surprising amount of comradery among new MPs finding their feet even across parties.
As a new Westminster correspondent for The Scotsman just starting my career in the lobby I found myself mixing quickly with a new cohort of Scottish Labour MPs who had arrived. Despite high hopes though, Cameron had failed to make a breakthrough in Scotland leaving David Mundell as the only Scottish Tory north of the Border.
Instead, the one new Tory Scot represented an English seat and was Mark Menzies. Great things were expected of the 39-year-old. He had been on Cameron's A-list of priority candidates and had come from a very successful career in the retail sector where he had won national awards and become a senior director at a major supermarket.
As people got to know each other he regularly joined me and some of the Scottish MPs for a drink on the Commons terrace and it was there that a brief attempt was made to woo him.
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Margaret Curran said she wanted to make Menzies her special project (Image: Reach Plc)
Margaret Curran, the new MP for Glasgow East but an experienced hand in Scottish Labour politics, was soon to become Ed Miliband's shadow Scottish Secretary.
She was particularly annoyed by the fact that Menzies was a Tory.
One evening she leaned across the table on the terrace and said to him: "I am going to make you my special project to bring back to the Labour Party. You can't be a working-class West of Scotland lad brought up by a single mum and a Tory! It's just not right."
The comment was only made in half jest but repeated several times that early summer until the battle lines on austerity saw the two sides more fixed on each other as the enemy.
Menzies himself, always engaging and polite, treated it as a friendly joke and declined the offer.
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After all, he had a long record in the Conservative Party - he had run for the Tories in Glasgow Govan in 2001, Selby in 2005 and then Fylde in 2010. At Glasgow University he was President of the Conservative Association.
At the time though he and everyone else expected him to get quickly promoted. He never made it past the first rung of the ministerial ladder as a Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) even though he was one of only seven 2010 intake Tories to be made a PPS immediately after the election. His second PPS job in 2014 saw him resign over allegations he had paid a Brazilian prostitute for drugs, which he denied.
As he fights to save his political career, Menzies must be wondering what might have been and even whether he should have stuck to his successful old career in retail.
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