Tractor porn MP Neil Parish has said he “did not mean to stray” but that many of his colleagues behaved “so much worse”.
The 67-year-old, who was forced to quit last April after it was found he twice viewed explicit material in the House of Commons, went on to claim he was “very well behaved in Parliament”.
Now, more than a year after the scandal erupted, Mr Parish has returned to the public eye in Channel 4’s new jail series Banged Up.
The show, the first episode of which aired on Tuesday night, interns seven well-known names as prisoners for a few days in a wing on the decommissioned Shrewsbury Prison.
In an interview with The Times, Mr Parish has said he “found it hard” being forced out of Parliament, “because so many MPs were behaving so much worse”.
“I was very well behaved in Parliament. I have a good marriage. I was nice to women. We had a lot of fun and jokes. I didn’t chase after them or intimidate them, yet it was my political carcass being flogged,” he said.
Mr Parish said: “I know I shouldn’t have been watching at work in the Commons, even if it was late. And I wasn’t flaunting it, but I genuinely didn’t mean to stray. I do spend a lot of time looking at tractors. All farmers do. We like a bit of kit.”
In the wide-ranging interview, Mr Parish also said he went to a “very dark place” after quitting as an MP, with police confiscating his guns for his own safety.
He added that the Conservative Party treated him like a “zombie” and said that Rishi Sunak is “a bit wet” compared to former prime minister Boris Johnson.
Mr Parish is appearing on Banged Up alongside veterans minister Johnny Mercer, Gogglebox star Marcus Luther, Sid Owen (Ricky on EastEnders), actor Tom Rosenthal, singer HRVY, and the columnist Peter Hitchens, who styles himself as a “one-man think tank”.
In the first episode, stars are subjected to various indignities, including being put through strip searches.
Neil Parish resigned from his Tiverton and Honiton seat after declaring that he was the politician who other MPs had spotted watching X-rated material in Parliament.
The former Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee chairman said he accidentally viewed an explicit video when browsing for tractors, before later doing so deliberately in the chamber.
His wife Sue Parish said the former member for was “just in a little corner somewhere”.
“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’.”
