The wife of “tractor porn” former MP Neil Parish has defended her husband’s actions, saying “people shouldn’t be looking over other people’s shoulders when they’re looking at their mobiles”.
Sue Parish said the former member for Tiverton and Honiton was “just in a little corner somewhere” when he twice viewed explicit material in the House of Commons.
Mr Parish was forced to quit over the scandal in April, leading to a by-election won by the Liberal Democrats in June.
Now, more than two months later, his wife has given an interview about the incident that ended his political career in disgrace.
“He wasn’t in the middle of the chamber waving it around,” she said. “There was no business going on. He was just waiting for votes. He hates to wait.”
And she added that she believed the two female MPs who had reported Mr Parish “could have just tapped him on the shoulder and told him off and said, ‘It’s not the thing to do’.”
She spoke out in an interview in the Daily Mail in which she also agreed with her husband’s assessment that he was oversexed.
“In the past, I’ve chased him round the kitchen with burdizzos,” the 66-year-old said. “The things you use on cattle to crush their balls.”
She appeared to suggest that she had not been unhappy when the Conservatives lost the resulting by-election.
In the same conversation, Mr Parish, also 66, doubled down on the claims that he had been looking at tractor websites while in parliament when he happened to stumble on the X-rated material.
“Everybody laughs and says you’re telling porky pies but I’m not,” he said. “When you go on to Google, lots of things come up. I look at tractors and cars … I’m not going to say what I googled but it’s not The Dominator as has been reported, because that’s a combine harvester.”
He added: “Maybe I deserve to be treated like s*** but I don’t think I did, actually. I was a stupid man. I did the wrong thing but even when you do the right thing – tell the truth and go – they feed on your political carcass.
“The crux of the matter is I never intended to offend. It was 11.30 at night. We’d had about 12 votes. I was sitting there minding my own business or doing the wrong thing in the far corner of the chamber. Got bored. Shouldn’t have been doing it.”
