British Conservative MP Neil Parish announced his resignation on Saturday April 30. The parliamentarian, accused by some of his peers of having watched pornography in the House of Commons, admitted the facts. “I was looking for tractors”assured the BBC (in English) the elected 65-year-old former farmer. “I came across another site that had a similar name and looked for a while, which I shouldn’t have done”he tried to explain. “But my crime, my biggest crime, is that I went back there a second time and it was deliberate”he confessed on the verge of tears, referring to a “crazy moment”.
In an interview at Daily Telegraph (in English) published on Saturday morning, he had suggested that he might have opened the site “by mistake”. “We support (Neil Parish’s) decision to step down as a Member of Parliament”said a Conservative spokesman for the constituency of Tiverton and Honiton, where Neil Parish was elected in 2019.
The announcement of his resignation comes after an investigation was launched on Wednesday by Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party into the incident. The name of the MP had not been released but Neil Parish had reported himself to the Parliament’s committee responsible for questions of the conduct of MPs, the Conservatives announced on Friday, which had suspended him from their parliamentary group on investigation time.
The elected official then announced that he wanted “continue to fulfill his role as a deputy during the investigations”. Many MPs insisted that he resign before the conclusions of the investigation if the accusations against him were true. ‘Neil Parish must think we’ve been born yesterday. Boris Johnson’s Tories are a national embarrassment’responded MP Angela Rayner.
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 which Boris Johnson described on Monday as “sexist and misogynistic bullshit”.
Also last week, the Sunday Times revealed that three ministers and two opposition MPs were facing charges of “bad behavior of a sexual nature”. They are among 56 deputies reported to an office responsible for registering these complaints, set up following the #MeToo movement.