I have accidentally stumbled across online porn – the internet has poisoned our world

There was much hilarity over the claim by disgraced Tiverton and Honiton MP Neil Parish that he was looking for tractors when he suddenly found himself on a porn website. A friend unwittingly stoked the laughter when he said that Parish, a farmer turned politician, had been viewing a Dominator combine harvester when the mishap occurred. Parish has since been described as an “extractor fan”.

“Titter ye not!” as the late great Frankie Howerd used to say. For I can confirm that innocent inquiries may lead to some pretty eye-popping destinations. On the recommendation of a neighbour, I was once trying to track down an ace group of female gardeners to come and restore our overgrown pond. Vaguely recalling the name, I took a guess and, instead of typing in “Women With Waders”, I wrote “Women In Waders”.

Cor blimey. Who knew that so many exuberantly upholstered ladies had squeezed themselves into latex for the delectation of mankind? It gave a whole new meaning to the term “spare tyre”.

Unlike Neil Parish, I did not return voluntarily, on a second occasion, to the rubber Rubenesques. On the contrary, it was the women in waders who would not leave me alone. Having accidentally clicked onto a porn site, my details were clearly sold on to countless rubber-fetish goods vendors across Southeast Asia.

Their pesky ads popped up on my phone and laptop with mortifying frequency, invariably when the kids were walking by (“Ugh, Mum, gross!”) or as I was kindly googling the location of a restaurant for the new vicar.

Then the creepy blighters start sending you related prompts. “If you enjoyed Beautiful Ladies in Latex You May Also Like…” “Allison, are you going to another fetish party soon?” No, no, NO. Please make it stop!

I was fortunate. Women In Waders has become a much-loved marital joke. “Darling, doesn’t that pond look like it needs seeing to?” Himself inquires brightly every May. “Surely, we need to get some of your charming lady friends in their exotic, thigh-high wellies round to tackle the weed.”

Who knows, if my initial search for gardening expertise had thrown up something more to my taste – Hot Roger Federer Lookalikes to, er, pick a genre entirely at random – I too might have been sucked down the drain into the dripping sewers of the internet. And lead us not into temptation, as we are taught to pray as children, but the internet is a machine for temptation. It eats morality.

We can all have a laugh about Tractorgate, but a good man’s life is in ruins, his family shamed, his Parliamentary career finished. Until his dying day, Parish will be known by the grim shorthand, Porn MP.

Let me be clear, there are no excuses for looking at pornography in public, let alone in the Chamber of the House of Commons. It is further dismaying evidence of how the boundary between private and public conduct has been eroded, and of a general collapse in manners. Me, I still feel guilty if I eat a sandwich on a train because my mother told us that eating outside was uncouth. (Whatever happened to “uncouth”? I miss it.)

How terribly tame such concerns seem compared to the guy I sat opposite on the train home to Wales who took no trouble to hide the fact he was watching porn on his phone. It was deeply unsettling, scary even. I have no doubt that man got off on the fact he was making me squirm; it was a moment of power over a woman who appeared to have done rather better in life than him, and he enjoyed it.

Until his dying day, Neil Parish will be known by the grim shorthand, Porn MP

So I sympathise with Parish’s female colleagues who reported him for staring at those demeaning images in their workplace. But I also feel for Neil Parish and Sue, his wife of 40 years. “I’m sorry, you’ve married a f---ing idiot,” he told her when the scandal broke. Sue, while admitting it was wrong and highly embarrassing, defended her husband saying, “He’s a lovely guy really. It’s all so stupid.”

The 65-year-old’s apology for his “moment of madness” on local television news was notably sincere and lacked the weaselly guile of more morally suspect MPS. Parish has single-handedly revived the lost art of blaming oneself for one’s own bad behaviour, instead of saying, “I’m sorry if you were offended by something I did”.

Of course, it was absolutely right that he should resign as a MP. But when it comes to sin, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I put it to you that Neil Quentin Gordon Parish is a bumbling, Pooterish amateur compared to many of his colleagues.

Like that bully John Bercow who, for years, was supported by the sanctimonious high priests on the Opposition benches. Or Claudia Webbe, formerly the Labour MP and now an Independent MP for Leicester East, who was sentenced to 10 weeks in custody, suspended for two years, after threatening an acid attack against a woman friend of her partner. The shameless and criminal Corbynite Webbe avoided much of the selfrighteous moralising now directed at the luckless Conservative Parish.

Meanwhile, with our jaws on the table, we learn that Angela Rayner regaled at least four MPS on the House of Commons terrace with the way she would cross and uncross her legs to distract Boris Johnson at the despatch box during PMQS. Strangely, it was that self-same Rayner who complained angrily about a story in the Mail on Sunday that reported “disgusting claims” from Tory MPS about her using her body to distract the PM, which were “steeped in classism”.

Hmm. You would have thought that the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party having the brass neck to accuse members of the Government of misogyny for inventing that story was a pretty serious ethical matter. Yet, it is the frankly idiotic tractor-porn incident that has led to miles of editorial soul-searching about “Westminster sleaze”.

A pledge by the Conservatives that half of all their MPS returned at the next election will be women misses the point. Give me one flawed but fundamentally decent Parish in Parliament instead of vicious Webbe any day.

The real question to emerge from this sad sordid affair is that if a bloke like Parish can become so disinhibited that he jeopardises his entire life for a goggle at Big Bertha during working hours, how many are safe from porn’s addictive power?

One way to end this farcical episode of Carry On Up the Commons is to ban smartphones from the Chamber. MPS have no business checking their Twitter retweets when they are supposed to be legislating on behalf of the nation.

When phones were first allowed into the Commons, I remember seeing Michael Gove give a stirring speech while every MP around him peered down at their screens. It looked so rude – and during a debate on education, of all things.

Teachers across the land have a battle to get kids to put away their damn phones and pay attention to their lessons. MPS should really be setting an example of diligent and respectful listening.

So, a plea to Speaker Lindsay Hoyle: please tell them all to hand in their phones at the door. Lead them not into temptation and deliver them from evil or, at the very least, from Dominator the naughty tractor.