Tories pledge half their MPs will be women, after Neil Parish porn scandal
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Half of the Conservative MPs returned at the next election must be women, the party’s chairman has said, as he warned that substantially increasing female representation would be key to tackling Westminster sleaze.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Oliver Dowden said the Conservatives were committed to a goal of equal gender representation in the Commons.
As a first step, he pledged to ensure that the party’s candidates list “reflects the fact that half the population are women”.
The intervention comes after Neil Parish, the Tory chairman of the Commons environment committee, said he was quitting as an MP as he admitted watching pornography twice in Parliament.
The 65-year-old said he first visited a graphic website accidentally while looking at tractors online, but then returned to the site deliberately, in a “moment of madness”.
This weekend, allies of Lord Frost urged him to consider standing in the by-election that will be created by Mr Parish’s departure from the traditionally safe Conservative seat in Devon.
Separately, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker, called for a review of working practices in Parliament and a “Speaker’s conference” of the political parties to consider whether it was right that MPs continued to employ staff directly. Concerns have been raised that staff feel unable to complain in cases where grievances are against the MP.
