British Conservative MP Neil Parish announced his resignation on Saturday, admitting he did in fact see pornography in the House of Commons, something he has been accused of by other MPs.
“I was looking for tractors,” the 65-year-old former farmer told the BBC. “I came across another website with a similar name and looked around for a while, which I shouldn’t have done,” he tried to explain. “But my crime, my greatest crime, is that I went back there a second time and it was on purpose,” he admitted tearfully, referring to a “moment of madness.” In an interview with the Daily Telegraph published on Saturday morning, he hinted that he may have opened the page “accidentally”.
Inquiry opened on Wednesday
“We support (Neil Parish’s) decision to step down as MP,” said a Conservative spokesman for Tiverton and Honiton, where Parish was elected in 2019.
The announcement of his resignation comes after Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party launched an inquiry into the incident on Wednesday. The MP’s name has not been released, but Parish has reported himself to Parliament’s committee on MPs’ conduct, the Conservatives said on Friday, who suspended him from their group pending the investigation.
The elected official then announced that he wanted to “continue to exercise his function as MP while the investigation is ongoing”. Many MPs insisted that if the allegations against him were true, he would resign before the inquiry was completed. “Neil Parish must think we were born yesterday. Boris Johnson’s Conservatives are a national embarrassment,” said Angela Rayner MP.
Allegations of “bad behavior of a sexual nature”
The Labor MP found herself at the center of a misogynistic attack last weekend after anonymous Tory MPs accused her of enjoying distracting the Prime Minister by crossing and uncrossing her legs in Parliament, comments Boris Johnson on Monday read as ” sexist and misogynistic bullshit”.
Also last week, the Sunday Times revealed that three opposition ministers and two MPs had been charged with “misconduct of a sexual nature”. They are among 56 MPs who have been reported to an office responsible for registering these complaints, set up after the Metoo movement.