TORY Neil Parish, who once ran for election in Torfaen, is resigning as an MP after admitting to twice watching pornography in Parliament.

The 65-year-old select committee chair said he first accidentally viewed porn after looking at tractors online, before then acting deliberately.

Mr Parish, who is a farmer by trade, said the second time was while he was sitting waiting to vote on the side of the Commons chamber, in a “moment of madness”.

He stood for Torfaen in the 1997 General Election, losing to Labour's Paul Murphy by a margin of 24,536 votes.

He had vowed to continue as the MP for Tiverton and Honiton after it was revealed he was the politician seen watching porn by two Conservative colleagues, but bowed to pressure to resign on Saturday.

He said in an interview with BBC South West that he recognised the “furore” and “damage” he was causing his family and his constituency in Devon before deciding “it just wasn’t worth carrying on”.

“The situation was, funnily enough it was tractors I was looking at, so I did get into another website with sort of a very similar name and I watched it for a bit, which I shouldn’t have done,” Mr Parish said.

“My crime, my most biggest crime, is that on another occasion I went in a second time, and that was deliberate.

“That was sitting waiting to vote on the side of the chamber.”

Mr Parish said he wanted to put on record “for all my rights and wrongs, I was not proud of what I was doing and the one thing I wasn’t doing, which I will take to my grave as being true, is I was not actually making sure people could see it.

“In fact I was trying to do quite the opposite.”

Asked again why he had viewed the material, he said: “I must have taken complete leave of my senses and my sensibilities and sense of decency, everything.”

Mr Parish said he was “not defending what I did for one moment” adding he thought the best thing he could do was to “tell the truth”.

A spokesperson for Tiverton and Honiton Conservatives said: “We would like to take this opportunity to thank Neil Parish for his service to our communities over the past 12 years.

“We support his decision to step down as our Member of Parliament.”