News & Opinion

Britain’s MPs have a huge number of issues to grapple with: terrorism, immigration, and the impact of ‘austerity’ cuts.

But these piffling matters pale next to their very obvious obsession—rating each other’s hotness via a website dedicated to their looks.

Last year, there were a reported 484,683 attempts to view the website sexymp.co.uk within the Palace of Westminster itself, of which—despite filters designed to stop the mucky pups—there were 52,786 successful views.

In short, Britain’s MPs, peers, and their staff can’t stop checking themselves out.

SexyMP, founded in 2011, is the most popular banned website at Westminster.

The website is the creation of diamond mining heir Francis Boulle, who—fans of the reality show Made in Chelsea may remember—as the red-haired one from earlier seasons, fantastically unlucky with women, but always stealing off to Africa to look for jewels. Now magazine estimated his wealth to be £10.1m ($15.77m).

He was also once suspended from the show for being unprofessional.

The website looks cheap, plays cheap, and is utterly addictive. It’s basically a relentless game of aesthetic top trumps, in which two pictures of MPs are placed alongside one another, and the viewer is invited to vote on “which MP would you rather have sex with? Choose one.”

And so it goes on interminably—there are 650 MPs, after all—and you can choose to play the game with male MPs only, female MPs only, or mixed.

Of course, your political affiliation may be compromised: say, when faced, with Nadhim Zawahi (Conservative) and Jack Dromey (Labour), you—as a Labour voter—go for Zawahi, or Mark Reckless (Conservative) above Michael McCann (Labour).

And politics isn’t known as “show business for ugly people” for nothing. Sometimes the choice laid out is between pretty-damn-ugly-no-thanks to never-not-even-if-it-was-just-us-on-a-desert-island-after-an-apocalypse.

As of today—as if to prove the Palace of Westminster is its own inexplicable island of crazy—Britain’s hottest MP, if you search under ‘mixed,’ is Owen Paterson, the Conservative MP for North Shropshire, who was Environment Secretary from 2012 to 2014, and who opposed gay marriage.

At number two is another Tory, Penny Mordaunt, famous for participating in celebrity diving show, Splash!.

It would seem that many of the voters are Conservative straight men (or lesbians), because the next nine positions are occupied by Conservative women.

The next man that appears is at number 49, the spectacularly named, potential Bond villain Richard Drax—another Conservative. Poor old David Cameron, the Prime Minister, comes in at number 221.

Even accounting for different strokes for different folks, there are some truly ugly people ahead of some clearly better-looking people.

Bizarrely, the pink-cheeked and fleshily-jowled Tories come out on top in the sexy vote: could it be their supporters and staff who have been voting more consistently?

Of course, you can—as the right-on, equality-minded Labour and the Liberal Democrats might—protest SexyMP’s existence as an exercise in mass, crude sexual objectification. However, as the people being judged, plus their supporters, seem to be so into it we should probably get beyond such cavils, and get clicking.

Poor old Nick Clegg is at number 233, and this from the former Liberal Democrat leader who revealed to GQ in 2008 that he had slept with “no more” than 30 women. Such a stud, and yet ranked below a great number of face-aches above him.

The website doesn’t appear to have been updated for some time: some people listed as MPs are no longer MPs, like former Foreign Secretary David Miliband, whom Hillary Clinton became a little light-headed over. In the world of SexyMP, Miliband is listed as still the 19th most fuckable male MP.

As for Boulle’s rationale behind setting the website up—it is, he claims, just good, innocent fun.

While his representatives did not return requests for comment, Boulle writes on the site: “In addition to my wanting to create a fun and memorable tool to help the British public get to know their Members of Parliament, I thought it would be an interesting opportunity to hold the first ever parliamentary beauty contest and find out once and for all which MPs and Parties have the most sex appeal.

“Although I fully expect this to offend some people, this was never my intention and I hope you will see the funny side.”