Porn MP ‘was looking for Dominator harvester’
FRIENDS of Neil Parish believe that the former Tory MP was searching for “Dominator” farm vehicles when he accessed adult material in Parliament.
Mr Parish, who resigned on Saturday after admitting watching pornography in the Commons chamber, claimed that he had first stumbled on the content while searching for tractors.
Colin Slade, a Devon county councillor, has now told The Daily Telegraph that it is likely Mr Parish had been searching for Dominators – a brand of combine harvester.
Mr Slade said he “could see” how the search could have led to inappropriate content as it is a “play on words”. He added that the search terms had not been confirmed to him by Mr Parish.
A Claas Dominator 76 combine harvester was spotted in the barn of Mr Parish’s family farm near Bridgwater in Somerset as he gave an interview regarding his resignation this weekend.
Mr Parish claimed on Saturday that he had been searching for “tractors” and got “into another website with sort of a very similar name and I watched it for a bit”.
The 65-year-old admitted that after stumbling across the site accidentally he went back and accessed it a second time as he was waiting to vote in the chamber, a decision he described as “deliberate” and “my biggest crime”.
His actions have sparked a debate on standards of behaviour in the Houses of Parliament. Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, yesterday insisted that there was not a culture of misogyny but just a few “bad apples”.
The Claas Dominator is one of Europe’s most popular combine harvesters and was first manufactured in Germany in the 1970s.
Mr Parish was photographed standing on one of the vehicles during a social media campaign.
In Thomas Hughes’s classic novel, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Tom’s father, Squire Brown, expresses the hope that his son will emerge from his boarding school (Rugby) “a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman”.
More than 150 years later, we still define our ideas about the mysterious quality known as “Character” in terms of courage, kindness and truthfulness. These are the virtues we expect from our elected representatives, and our dismay when they fail to live up to them is intense.
The think tank director James Kirkup recently observed that “for a disproportionate number of MPS, politics is about the need to address a loss or lack of something”. He was describing psychic wounds, but when it comes to explaining behaviour that might scandalise the electorate, Honourable Members seem irresistibly prone to filling the void left by a loss of courage and a lack of truthfulness with excuses of ever more baroque inventiveness.
When in retreat from wrongdoing, “a moment of madness” is a useful fallback position. You were beguiling a dull debate by scouring the internet for tractors, like a Parliamentary Jeremy Clarkson, when you found yourself “in a website with a very similar name”. (There is, as it happens, an agricultural machine known as the Claas Dominator). In a “moment of madness” the innocent combine seems to have led to a viewing of other, less bucolic, combinations, and a swift route back to the old farmstead for the erstwhile Tiverton MP, Neil Parish.
Not that he is alone in the feeble excuse department: “stress” gets blamed for anything from hair loss to florid sexual misconduct (or, in the case of former Lib Dem MP Mark Oaten, both). The catch-all excuse of “mental health” proves equally versatile, as the Culture Secretary, Nadine Dorries, has often found, most recently last month, when she complained of being mocked for “dyslexia … which affects my speech more than my writing” after a Tiktok video in which she spoke of tennis “pitches”.
If you don’t care to play the victim, you could come out swinging, like former Tory MP for Totnes, Anthony Steen, who blamed criticism of his expenses claims on “jealousy”. Then there is the wholesome nature-lover’s defence, initially adopted by Welsh MP Ron Davies, who insisted that he had not been cruising, but “badgerwatching” at that notorious wildlife sanctuary, Clapham Common.
At a certain point, the professional deformations of political life seem to lead politicians to hazard explanations for misbehaviour so flimsy that they are frankly begging to be disbelieved. “Hiking the Appalachian trail” – the excuse for six days that Mark Sanford, then Governor of South Carolina, spent adulterously incommunicado in Buenos Aires became a euphemism as familiar as Private Eye’s “Ugandan discussions”; Dominic Cummings’s “eye test” account of his Covid restrictions-busting Barnard Castle jaunt; Matt Hancock’s Mills & Boon “I fell in love” mitigation for the same offence; the Prime Minister’s cake ambush – these are justifications so perfunctory that they mock the very principle of veracity.
Politics is a calling so demanding that it is hard to believe that anyone enters it without a spark of idealism. A pity, then, for the MPS who spend their time in the House of Commons working bravely, helpfully and truthfully, that a highly visible minority of their colleagues seem to have adopted as their motto Bart Simpson’s perennial cry of: “It wasn’t me! I didn’t do it.”