Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register LONDON, April 30 (Reuters) – A British lawmaker’s expelled from Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party said on Saturday he had resigned after admitting he had seen pornography on his phone in the House of Commons “in a moment of madness”. The Conservatives suspended Neil Parish on Friday after he referred to Parliament’s Standards Commissioner. Paris resigned on Saturday after saying he would continue to be a member of parliament while an investigation is under way. read more Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register “In the end I was able to see that the anger and damage I was causing to my family and my constituency was simply not worth continuing,” a tearful Paris told the BBC in an interview on Saturday. Paris, a farmer, said the first time he saw the clear material he stumbled upon it while searching for a tractor on a site with a similar name and then “watched it for a while which I should not have done”. “But my crime, the biggest crime is that in another case I came in a second time and that was intentional. He was sitting and waiting for me to vote from the side of the room.” Asked what was going through his mind, he described it as “a moment of madness”. Earlier this week, British media reported that a female minister said she saw a male colleague watching pornography as she sat next to her in the House of Commons and the same legislator watching pornography during a committee hearing. “I was not proud of what I did,” Paris said, adding that he did not intend to be seen by those around him. “I’re not going to defend what I did. What I did was completely, completely wrong … I think I must have completely lost consciousness.” In an interview with The Times published before his resignation, Paris’s wife said she did not know that her husband had done something similar in the past and that her husband was “a wonderful person”. “It was very embarrassing,” Su Paris was quoted as saying by the newspaper. “I was out of breath, honestly.” Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Report by Kylie MacLellan. Editing by Catherine Evans and Hugh Lawson Our role models: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
