Tractor, porn, prison. The three words circulate round my mind as I drive past two crematoriums, several humping cattle and a vast red Massey Ferguson before entering Neil Parish’s Somerset farm. There’s a BMW in the drive and a builder is repainting the porch. My former Tory MP, having lost his Tiverton and Honiton seat last year, cannot be doing too badly, I suggest. He grins back at me, phone glued to his ear, and mouths, “GB News.” As I follow him into his kitchen, he says, “I’m a bit of a pundit nowadays.” Then he winks.
But we are here to talk about his views on prisons, rather than politics or porn. Having been booted out of the House of Commons last year for watching illicit material on his phone “in a moment of madness; it was late at night”, he has joined Channel 4’s new reality show, Banged Up, and has volunteered with six other “celebrities” to be locked up in the decommissioned HMP Shrewsbury for a week with former convicts — murderers, contract killers and drug dealers — and strip-searched and screamed at by the wardens to simulate conditions in a real jail.
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Surely that is a bit much, even for watching porn in the cradle of democracy, or is it a form of penance? “Actually, it was partly for the cash,” says the 67-year-old. “I was going to use the money for my left hip but I managed to get the NHS to do that, so I thought I could get another farm building instead.” A week in prison, Parish suggests, has made him more contrite and his wife, Sue, a retired French teacher, agrees. “He’s less bumptious now,” she says.
We sit down together on well-worn leather couches, surrounded by the paraphernalia of a working West Country farm: beer glasses, swirly carpets and a dusty row of cups and rosettes. Parish has lived on this farm since he was born, he says. The cups are his various prizes for soil management. All except the last one. “That was for dressing up as a golliwog at the local flower show when I was four,” he says. “I was blacked up. It was the Sixties. You couldn’t do that now, but in those days it wasn’t racist. I was a white snowman another time. They had to roll me into the village hall.” Kitty, his labrador, rubs up against me. “She’s less randy than our last dog,” Parish says.
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What you see is what you get with Parish. He is disarmingly frank and uncomplicated, more at ease, I suspect, mucking out his cows in his overalls than he was in Westminster in his pink tie and shooting vest.
“You can start the Spanish Inquisition,” he says, once we all have a strong mug of tea. “You’re not Spanish, are you? I haven’t offended you already?” I explain I am a former constituent and wonder whether he is thinking of standing for a new seat. “I might stand as an independent. Despite my misdemeanours, I’ve always got on well with Tivertonians, especially the farmers. They moan a bit, but they’re a resilient bunch, like me. It’s the sophisticated retired accountants and barristers who were the most sanctimonious.”
His wife has other ideas. “I don’t want him to be an MP any more,” she says. “We did it for years up and down to London and I couldn’t go through that again.” Sue has stood by him throughout, as petite, sleek and sharp as he is broad, rumpled and twinkly-eyed. She only discovered he had been caught watching porn when a local BBC reporter rang the farm. She is his “rock”.
Parish could have done I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!. “I toyed with it… Or Love Island,” he says jokingly. So why end up in prison? “I found the idea fascinating. It was outside my sphere and comfort zone. I do think there is a need for penal reform and, having been in public life and then imploded, it was an opportunity to use my brain again and test out whether I could return in public.”
As a sociable animal, he must miss being in the thick of the herd. “Oh, absolutely. The trouble with me is I crashed the car just when I was having fun. I was chairing the committee on environment, food and rural affairs — my dream job — working very hard at it. In my small world of select committees I was a big fish and all of a sudden, bang, crash, within five days I was out of parliament and gone, a laughing stock. It was a huge shock to the system.
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If I hadn’t had Sue and the cows… Well, anyway, I went to a very dark place. The police came and took away my guns for my own safety. I joked that I was a bad shot, but I’d got very depressed.” His party deserted him immediately, he says. “That’s where they need to learn a few lessons — I was a zombie to them. It was the police who checked up on me four or five times, and the other farmers.”
After 18 months, Parish seems to have bounced back. Was there any sense with this series of making amends? “A little bit,” he says. “When they took us through group therapy at the end to face up to the consequences of our misdemeanours, it reduced me to a nervous wreck. But it was good for me to see what I had done to Sue. She was the hero of the hour. I certainly wasn’t. And although I’d been stupid and wrong, the former inmates told me that I needed to move on, just as they had. Psychologically it was good for me.”
Of all the celebrities banged up in HMP Shrewsbury, Parish possibly comes out of it the best. He is down to earth and often unintentionally funny. The former prisoners, he thinks, liked him “because I wasn’t your usual stuck-up Oxbridge graduate. I was a proud former Young Farmer. When I was young, I got much more ribbing than I did in jail. I went to a tough state-run boarding school. I also had a father who had a pretty temper and could lash out, so I wasn’t too worried about whether I could cope.”
On the first day we see Parish trundling up to the huge prison gates dragging his battered wheelie suitcase. Within minutes, his possessions have been taken away and he is being strip-searched, squatting down naked so they can check he hasn’t “secreted anything up my bottom. That didn’t worry me. I don’t like clothes anyway,” he says. “He’s always stripping off,” Sue says. Parish interjects
in case I get the wrong idea. “After a long day on the farm, I strip off and swim in the river. We’re not prissy here.”
The celebrities are all paired with an ex-convict in their 6ft x 12ft cells, who is told to rough them up a bit. Parish is sharing with Chet Sandhu, an intimidating Sikh covered in tattoos. “He soon started ranting and raving at me and that was pretty frightening,” says Parish. “I was blamed for everything, even what the Empire did in India. I was taking all these verbal punches. He’d once been a drug dealer and into prostitution and blackmail, but I thought Channel 4 wouldn’t let me be killed, so I took solace from that and by the end we got on like a house on fire.”
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The scenes between Parish and Sandhu, who now has his own clothing brand and CBD oil business, are some of the most engaging in the series. “He told me all about life in jail, the sex and the beatings, the drugs and the needles and the various vulnerable people he had looked out for.” Sandhu makes Parish weapons for his own protection. “It was very touching… The pièce de résistance was the toothbrush. He melted it and stuck blades into it.”
The “atrocious” food, he says, was harder to stomach. “Not something to feed my animals. All of it was imported and cold. You weren’t short of calories, but it was sliced white bread and jam and cereal, all in a plastic bag.” Parish was also appallingly untidy. “Chet was always telling me off as he liked his cell very clean. I told him that he sounded like my wife, but by then we were friends and he laughed.”
Once the prisoners realised Parish was Mr Tractor Porn, they teased him mercilessly. “I had to say I was watching heterosexual sex because the one thing they don’t like is paedophiles. They wanted to talk about porn a lot. I used all my political acumen to say something, but not too much.”
Parish never preaches, which is why he’s the most accepted by the former convicts. They were soon lending him shower gel, soap and even an illegal phone to ring home. The worst moment came when one prisoner tipped a rubbish bin all over his bed and squirted sauce over his sheets, but “as a farmer, I have seen worse”. He endeared himself to everyone when someone pooed in the shower. “Muggins here volunteered to clean it up, but I am used to excrement. Psychologically you have to go in there and think these guys have done a lot of bad stuff, but I knew they were reformed, so I didn’t patronise or talk down to them. I think it helped that we all had pasts.”
Since filming ended, Sandhu has been to the farm with his girlfriend. “We talk on the phone,” Parish says. “We are genuinely friends. I don’t think Channel 4 expected that.” It’s more than can be said of the Tory MPs who all dropped him. Sue is obviously still seething. “It was totally out of order [for those women] to look over his shoulder at his phone,” she says. “I am afraid this is a very feminist thing. If a man had seen him doing it, they would just have said, ‘Oi! Put it away, you idiot,’ and that would have been the end of it. But no, they had to take it further.”
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If Parish had been watching porn at home on the sofa next to her, would she have minded? “Not really. What people do in their spare time with their own phone is frankly their affair and you either get used to it or you divorce them. If you criminalised or took to task all the men who watched porn, you’d have huge problems. It’s just a storm in a teacup. My friends and our neighbours felt the same.” Sue has only once watched porn. “I didn’t enjoy it. It was rather tedious.”
Parish pats her shoulder. “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. This was 11.30 at night. We’d already voted 10 or 12 times. I got distracted by a site linked to the name of tractors.” The Terminator combine harvester maybe? “I am not going into any more detail, otherwise everyone will be going on it.”
The problem was he was seen doing it twice. “That’s why I resigned.” Sue interjects again: “You did say you would apologise to the Tory women, and they wouldn’t let you do that.” Parish is more sanguine. “I just found it hard 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 has a point, I suppose. Myriad MPs have been cautioned in this parliament for sexist, bullying, groping behaviour. “I used to steer clear of the bars at night because people do have too much to drink and it’s not a good idea,” he says.
How did prison compare? “There are similarities. They are both regimented and structured, but in some ways it’s tougher in Westminster. You don’t make a lot of friends. Everyone is competing. In prison there was a lot of bad language, but by the end I felt more included and welcomed.”
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It’s extraordinary that he feels he made closer friends in a week in prison than during 12 years in Westminster. “I appear to have done,” he says. “Once you have a smell about you at Westminster, they avoid you. They don’t want to be contaminated.”
He has learnt a lot about prison that he would now like to share. “They all wanted a second chance, like me. That’s why I am so appalled they are chucked out on the street when they have done their time with only £82 in their pocket and no job to go back to. It makes it almost impossible to start again.”
He says he would now like to campaign for better treatment and rehabilitation for prisoners. “I did think about tackling the porn industry,” he says. “It’s far too easy for the young to watch violent and misogynist porn. But in the end I was a politician who was trying to be taken seriously again and I don’t want to be pigeonholed into porn.”
He pities the younger generation. “Sex, dating and all that stuff is more complex now. It was simple when I was a Young Farmer. There were no dating apps or online porn, just dances and a few naughty mags.”
Parish first met Sue at a wedding. “It was quite incestuous actually. Our brother and sister were getting married. We hit it off straight away.” It hasn’t always been easy. There have been moments when Sue has chased him round with a pair of ram castrating tongs and threatened to cut off his balls if she thought he was flirting. But it is usually in jest, Parish says.
Are farmers highly sexed? “It’s all around you on the farm. You’re dealing with life, sex and death all the time. Let’s say I’ve got a healthy appetite.” Sue raises an eyebrow, but they are obviously fond of each other.
What makes Parish happiest, he now realises, is “pottering around with my wife on the farm with my cows. We’ve got some Devon cattle, some reds, some Herefords, mainly native breeds. I’m a proper peasant.”
As for standing as an independent, he says, “Well, it’s not really a good time to be a Tory. Maybe I’ve been lucky to get out early. Boris I got on OK with. He always wanted to please you, though he wasn’t straight. Rishi is a bit wet.”
Few in parliament from any party, he thinks, understand farmers and rural life. “It’s easy for the super-rich to rewild their vast estates while they fly round the world on their private jets and mouth off about methane coming out of cows’ backsides, but if there’s no farming left in Britain, we’ll be chopping down Brazilian rainforest to import all our food.”
Parish, the youngest of three, left school at 16 with three O-levels, milked his father’s cows and became an MEP before standing for parliament in 2010.
“I drove myself to the top,” he says. “I was never part of the establishment, but you need people like me in parliament, with a bit of common sense.”
It is clear he feels he has paid his dues. He could be the next Jeremy Clarkson. “Maybe. If I got his Lamborghini tractor, then I would be purring.” Ah, the tractor that’s called “total domination with class”. He laughs. He still loves a bit of lambing, “though my hands are a bit large to get up their backsides. I’d like to be fit as a fiddle until the end and then die in my tractor. That’s what happened to my neighbour. I feel I’ve licked my wounds enough now. My stint in prison showed me I’m not ready to lie down and die.”
Banged Up starts tonight at 9.15pm on Channel 4
