Former Torfaen candidate quits after admitting he watched porn in the Commons
Tory Neil Parish is resigning as an MP after admitting to twice watching pornography in Parliament.
The former candidate for the seat of Torfaen in the south-east of Wales had the Conservative whip removed yesterday while he was being investigated for allegedly watching pornography in the Commons chamber.
The 65-year-old select committee chair said he first accidentally viewed porn after looking at tractors online, before then acting deliberately.
Mr Parish, who is a farmer by trade, said the second time was while he was sitting waiting to vote on the side of the Commons chamber, in a “moment of madness”.
He had vowed to continue as the MP for Tiverton and Honiton after it was revealed he was the politician seen watching porn by two Conservative colleagues, but bowed to pressure to resign on Saturday.
Damage
He said in an interview with BBC South West that he recognised the “furore” and “damage” he was causing his family and his constituency in Devon before deciding “it just wasn’t worth carrying on”.
“The situation was, funnily enough it was tractors I was looking at, so I did get into another website with sort of a very similar name and I watched it for a bit, which I shouldn’t have done,” Mr Parish said.
“My crime, my most biggest crime, is that on another occasion I went in a second time, and that was deliberate.
“That was sitting waiting to vote on the side of the chamber.”
Mr Parish said he wanted to put on record “for all my rights and wrongs, I was not proud of what I was doing and the one thing I wasn’t doing, which I will take to my grave as being true, is I was not actually making sure people could see it.
“In fact I was trying to do quite the opposite.”
Asked again why he had viewed the material, he said: “I must have taken complete leave of my senses and my sensibilities and sense of decency, everything.”
Mr Parish said he was “not defending what I did for one moment” adding he thought the best thing he could do was to “tell the truth”.
Mr Parish who stood in Torfaen in 1997 and lost by 24,536 votes in that year’s Labour landslide.
Mr Parish is the chairman of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee.
He was first elected to Parliament in the 2010 General Election as the MP for Tiverton and Honiton.
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Good riddance. Now he can sit in the privacy of his own home and tug his old bell rope all day long ! There again his missus might have something to say about that.
Probably others in the now renamed Conservative and Onanist Party.
Tory Neil Parish was pushed rather than resigned. His initial denial that he “accidentally” clicked on a link to a porn website was untrue when today he admitted visiting the same website again while in the House of Commons chamber. And the irony is. Today we are witness to another of Boris Johnson’s minions falling on their sword where he himself being a coward clings on like a tick to the underbelly of Britain. But I ask this question. What will it take for people to get it into their thick skulls that this Tory idiocracy is unfit to govern?… Read more »
All kicking off on Twitter where Massey Ferguson is trending and some wag reckons tractors are a gateway drug and we need to get Boris into rehab and detox him of his JCB addiction.
Perv.
Did he actually search for ‘mucky spreaders’ by mistake?
Astounding how watching porn correctly gets you sacked, but repeatedly breaking the law (international and the ones you created), misappropriating taxpayer’s money repeatedly, lying repeatedly and repeatedly undermining the legally binding referendum agreements of three nations, does not.
Couldn’t wait til he got home – a sign of deep addiction. He needs help.