British lawmaker Neil Parish has resigned after admitting he watched pornography twice in UK Parliament's House of Commons.

The Conservative MP for Tiverton and Honiton in Southwest England was suspended on Friday after reporting himself to parliament's standards commissioner after two female colleagues claimed they had seen him looking at adult content on his phone while sitting near them.

He told BBC South West he would resign immediately, calling it a "moment of madness," adding that he "was not proud of what I was doing."

He said the second time was deliberate, but the first was accidental and happened while he was looking for a website about tractors. 

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"The situation was that - funnily enough it was tractors I was looking at. I did get into another website that had a very similar name and I watched it for a bit which I shouldn't have done. But my crime - biggest crime - is that on another occasion I went in a second time," said Parish.

Asked if that was on purpose he said: "That was deliberate... that was sitting waiting to vote on the side of the chamber."

"What I did was absolutely totally wrong," he added. "I was wrong, I was stupid, I lost sense of mind." 

He said he was standing down after seeing the damage it was causing his family, his constituency and local association, but denied watching the material in a way where he hoped other people would see it.

"I make a full apology. A total full apology. It was not my intention to intimidate," he said.

Parish's wife said  in an interview with The Times newspaper published on Saturday that she was not aware of her husband having carried out similar actions before, saying he was "a lovely person."

"It was all very embarrassing," Sue Parish said. "My breath was taken away, frankly."

"People shouldn't be looking at pornography. He would never just sit there with people looking... These ladies were quite right to be as cross as they were because I was cross, too," she said.

Responding to the incident on Thursday, Prime Minister Borish Johnson said that such actions would be unacceptable in any workplace.

The issue of sexism in parliament has been at the fore of British politics this week after a newspaper published an article in which an anonymous Conservative lawmaker claimed the deputy leader of the opposition Labour Party, Angela Rayner, was trying to distract Johnson in parliament by crossing and uncrossing her legs.

Johnson has criticized the comments as misogyny. Rayner said she was "crestfallen."