Neil Parish has now been suspended from the Conservative whip after referring himself to Parliament’s complaints process following allegations he watched pornography in the Commons chamber.
The Tiverton and Honiton MP spoke to the chief whip today and had the whip removed pending the outcome of the investigation. Two female Conservative MPs alleged earlier this week that they had seen a colleague watching porn in the chamber while sitting next to a female minister.
The claims were naturally explosive and have dominated Westminster ever since. They have opened up the debate on misogyny and sexism in Parliament more widely.
It has led to MPs making separate allegations against other figures in parliament. Anne-Marie Trevelyan said in an interview today that she had been pinned up against a wall by a colleague who told her she must want him because he was a powerful man. And an unnamed female Labour MP said a shadow cabinet member had described her as a ‘secret weapon’ because men wanted to sleep with her.
These allegations are a seemingly paradoxical combination of shocking and totally unsurprising to most women in Westminster. But what has also been quite unsurprising is that the general response to this has been to talk about the culture in Westminster. And that discussion tends to focus on the long hours, the drinking, and the separation from family back in the constituency. While those factors undoubtedly make Westminster a more toxic and dysfunctional place, the more pernicious culture is the one of not taking women seriously. That is manifested in behaviour that takes place precisely because the perpetrator knows that they’ll get away with it. That has little to do with how long someone spends on the parliamentary estate each day or how much they drink.
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