After admitting to watching pornography on his phone in the House of Commons chamber, a lawmaker from Britain’s ruling Conservative party has announced his resignation.
After what he called an unacceptable moment of “complete craziness,” Neil Parish, who represents a constituency in southwest England, said that he was standing down and calling a by-election in the Tory stronghold.
“I think I must have taken complete leave of my senses and my sensibilities and in a sense of decency, everything,” he told the BBC on Saturday.
“(It was) a moment of madness and also totally wrong… I’m not going to defend it.”
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After being publicly outed on Friday, the 65-year-old, who has been an MP since 2010, had already been suspended from the Conservatives and faced at least two parliamentary investigations.
After at least two other MPs protested that an MP had been observed watching porn in the Commons, amid larger claims of a misogynistic environment in Britain’s parliament, his public identification put an end to days of conjecture.
Parish’s decision to leave will result in a by-election in the Tiverton and Honiton district in Devon, where he earned a landslide victory over Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2019.
Since its inception in 1997, the constituency has produced Conservative MPs.
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However, since last summer, Johnson and his party have been embroiled in a series of scandals that have tarnished their reputation. Last December, the Conservatives lost a by-election in the usually safe seat of North Shropshire for the first time.
Another Conservative MP, Imran Ahmad Khan, departed parliament this month following his conviction for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old child, and the party is facing another tough by-election in Wakefield, in northern England.
Meanwhile, on Thursday, voters across the United Kingdom will go to the polls in local elections in which the Conservatives are expected to underperform, putting even more pressure on Johnson.
Parish, a farmer who has chaired a monitoring committee focused on the environment and rural matters, said in an interview that he first saw porn in parliament after accidentally switching from a tractor website to an adult content site with a similar name.
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“My 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 (Commons) chamber,” he explained.
The MP went on to say that, contrary to claims, he had not intended to make his conduct known to his colleagues.
“I will take to my grave as being true… I was not actually making sure people could see it. In fact, I was trying to do quite the opposite.”
The incident comes just days after it was disclosed that parliament’s own complaints office is investigating at least 56 MPs, including three ministers, for allegations of sexual misconduct.
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Meanwhile, the Conservative Party has been accused of misogyny after unidentified Tory MPs were cited in the Mail on Sunday newspaper last week accusing the opposition Labour Party’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, of attempting to distract Prime Minister Boris Johnson with her legs.
Rayner was one of the first to openly react to Parish’s resignation, calling Johnson’s Conservatives a “national embarrassment.”
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