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U.K. politician caught playing Candy Crush for hours

The MP says he was "fully engaged" with the pension reform discussion.

 

Rob Price

Tech

Posted on Dec 8, 2014   Updated on May 30, 2021, 1:09 am CDT

It’s a very British political scandal for the modern age: A politician is in hot water after being caught out playing Candy Crush in Parliament—for two and a half hours.

British tabloid the Sun has caught Conservative MP Nigel Mills engrossed in the game on his tablet during a committee hearing on pension reform, reportedly over a space of nearly three hours. Mills says he “probably had a game or two, the BBC reports, but remained “fully engaged.”

“I shouldn’t do it, but if you check the meeting I would say I was fully engaged in asking questions that I thought were particularly important in how we got the pensions issue right. I shall try not to do it in future.”

The Sun’s anonymous source said that “this just sums up the attitude of our lazy MP’s—feathering their nests at the taxpayers’ expense. It goes to show that people in Westminster don’t give a monkey’s about the people they represent. After all that happened with the expense scandal, these people are still out for themselves.”

Mills was playing the game consistently when not asking questions, the source claims. “As soon as he had finished these pre-scripted questions, he was tapping away of the game again,” the source said. “He would temporarily go back to the home screen as the questions were being answered but as soon as they were finished, he would go back into the game.” 

There is now to be an investigation into the photo and video footage—but unbelievably, as Sky political correspondent Sophy Ridge points out, it won’t be Mills under investigation:

The Daily Mail reports that, if discovered, the source could be banned from Parliament for “taking images without permission.”

Mills has also since issued a more contrite-sounding apology, saying that he “[apologizes] unreservedly for my behavior at the committee meeting and realize it fell short of what is expected of a Member of Parliament. … I guarantee it will not happen again.”

H/T BBC | Photo via andy hibberd@dncc/Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0) | Remix by Jason Reed 

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*First Published: Dec 8, 2014, 12:43 pm CST