A British MP has resigned from Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party after being caught, twice, viewing pornography on his phone in the House of Commons, the lower house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

The Conservatives suspended Neil Parish on Friday after he reported himself to parliament’s standards commissioner.

He then resigned on Saturday, having previously said he would continue as a member of parliament while an investigation was carried out. He said:

In the end, I could see that the furore and the damage I was causing my family and my constituency [by] association, it just wasn’t worth carrying on.

Parish, a farmer, said the first time he had viewed the explicit material was when he had accidentally stumbled across it when looking for tractors on a website with a similar name, and had then “watched it for a bit, which I shouldn’t have done”. He added:

But my crime, most biggest crime, is that — on another occasion — I went in a second time and that was deliberate. That was [while] sitting, waiting to vote, on the side of the chamber.

I was not proud of what I was doing.

I am not going to defend what I did. What I did was absolutely, totally wrong … I think I must have taken complete leave of my senses.

Asked what had been going through his mind, he described it as “a moment of madness”.

Earlier this week, British media had reported that a female minister said she had seen a male colleague viewing pornographic material while sitting beside her in the Commons chamber and watching pornography during a committee hearing.

Source: Reuters