Top U.K. Politician Quits Over Porn-at-Work Scandal

LONDON—Damian Green, the United Kingdom’s First Secretary of State and effectively the second-most powerful politician in the U.K., resigned on Tuesday after an investigator’s report found that he had made “inaccurate and misleading” statements about porn found on his work computer in 2008, according to a report in London’s Telegraph newspaper.

As AVN.com reported earlier this month, Green—the top deputy to Britain’s Conservative Party Prime Minister Theresa May—was the target of an investigation over leaked government documents in 2008. Though he escaped any charges due to a lack of evidence in the leaking case, police who inspected his computer at the time also found “thousands” of pornographic images on the government-owned, office computer. 

It was only late this year that the revelation about porn on Green’s computer was made public. Green in November repeatedly denied that he had ever viewed porn on the computer. But on Tuesday, investigators said that Green “misled the public” with those denials.

In fact, Green had known about the porn on his computer since 2008, the investigators found.

When the scandal broke in November, even some of Green’s staunchest defenders, such as the conservative Daily Mail newspaper, acknowledged that if it were shown that Green lied to the prime minister about the computer porn, he would be obligated to quit. That now appears to be exactly what happened.

Green and May have been friends and political allies for three decades, but May confirmed that when she learned about the report, and Green’s “misleading” denials, she asked for his resignation.

In a brief resignation letter, Green apologized for his lies about whether or not he knew that his work computer contained porn.

"I accept that I should have been clear in my press statements that police lawyers talked to my lawyers in 2008 about the pornography on the computers, and that the police raised it with me in a subsequent phone call in 2013,” he wrote. “I apologize that my statements were misleading on this point.”

But the investigator’s report did not directly accuse Green of viewing the porn images, focusing only his statements to the public regarding whether he knew about the images on his computer, statements that “fall short of the honesty requirement of the Seven Principles of Public Life and constitute breaches of the Ministerial Code,” the report said.

Green was also accused of sexually harassing journalist Kate Maltby, in 2015. But though the report called the accusations “plausible,” it said that “it is not possible to reach a definitive conclusion” on whether Green acted inappropriately toward Maltby or not.