At the end of a live GB News interview just three days ago about a report on rural poverty, Neil Parish was asked in passing for his views on claims that a Tory MP had been caught watching pornography. “If you have got 650 members of parliament in what is a very intense area you are going to get people that step over the line,” the Conservative MP told GB News, pokerfaced. “I don’t think there is necessarily a huge culture [of that behaviour] here but it does have to be dealt with and dealt with seriously and I think that is what the whips will do in our whips’ office.” After a 12-year parliamentary career in which the MP for Tiverton and Honiton had rarely – if ever – been elevated to national importance, he now finds himself at the centre of a political storm after it emerged on Friday that the Tory whip had been removed from him over the allegations.
A farmer and former member of the European parliament for South West England, and a councillor before that, Parish was part of the 2010 parliamentary intake when he won what has increasingly become a safe Tory seat. Since then, he has avoided controversy and has tended to measure his words relatively carefully in media appearances and has served since 2015 as chair of the environment, food and rural affairs select committee (Efra).
One of the few areas where he has gone against the grain of his own party has been in his opposition to rewilding, which he opposes despite it being a position endorsed by Boris Johnson himself and most of the party. One Tory source with previous experience working with him on the Efra committee – to which Parish was returned as chair in successive terms – described him as quiet and hard working. “He would not have been on the top of my list of suspects,” they said, adding that Parish, 65, is “rather boring, actually”. Parish had been a farmer in his native Somerset and still lives on the family farm, according to a profile on his website, which says he is married and has two children and two grandchildren. The MP employs his wife as a junior secretary, according to his register of interests, which also declares interests from the family farm in Somerset.
The MP’s website also lists “the politics of Africa” as being among his other interests, adding that a ban on him re-entering Zimbabwe after he criticised Robert Mugabe’s regime in his capacity as an election monitor remained in place to this day. The MP had said this week that he also wore “as a badge of honour” the fact that he was among more than 280 MPs who had been “sanctioned” by Russia. Records of Parish’s parliamentary voting record, meanwhile, show that he has tended to go – in the vast majority of cases – in the same direction as Tory colleagues, though he was among those who had advocated during the 2016 referendum for the UK to remain in the EU. In the past, Parish had gained some fans among animal welfare campaigners when he tried to stop the government signing post-Brexit trade deals that would have devalued animal welfare. Nevertheless, nature campaigners have reacted to the latest news by saying they hoped that he would be replaced on the committee by someone who was more in favour of nature restoration than Parish, who usually takes the side of landowners and farmers in rewilding debates.