Pat - // You may forgive your husband for what he did - would you forgive your MP?//
Andy, yes. Of course. In fact as long as he was a good MP there would nothing to forgive. //
Interesting.
It appears from what you say that our lawmakers and representatives are given a slide if they display gargantuan lapses of judgement, as long as they are doing a good job otherwise.
Personally, that chimes with me, the age-old argument that Hitler loved dogs and Mussolini made the trains run on time.
Being good is not a credit account against which you can draw when you do something bad.
If that were true we could never ever prosecute a paedophile priest, any one of whom could have a queue around the block of people to testify all the wonderful things they have done.
Do we check back on the career of the police officer who was jailed for murdering George Floyd, and release him because he saved a child from a burning building?
That is simply not how society operates.
Virtually everyone who does one thing that causes them to lose their job, or their liberty, or even their live, is not an inherently bad person, they have just done one bad thing which, given the time again, they would not do again.
But society has to act on the bad thing someone has done, not simply 'excuse' it because it's a one-off against a blameless life.
// He made a stupid mistake in denying it. //
He did, and that simply amplifies his absence of judgement in acting as he did in the first place.
But his action was not a 'mistake', it was deliberate, and you don't have to take my word for it, Mr Parish has said so himself on television.
// I think theresa lot of hypocrisy on this thread. //
Can you offer any examples of that?
// And quite a few that enjoy the fact that he's lost his job, etc. //
I take no pleasure at all in the fact that he has lost his job - only that his constituents are given their basic right in a democracy, to be represented by an individual who is fit and able to do the job, which Mr Parish has demonstrated not to be.
// Poor man and his poor family. //
Half of that statement is correct - his family are innocent and have to bear the consequences of his behaviour.
He is not a 'poor man', he is, as I have said previously, an immature, unfeeling, arrogant, stupid fool who has added fuel to the flames of the argument that men in Parliament are badly behaved overly-entitled, crass immoral idiots.