The Diary of a Secret Tory MP: (Almost!) True Stories from the Heart of British Politics

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Lots of Conservative MPs were following him on Twitter; people started to slide into his DMs to congratulate him on a point well landed, or make suggestions. His other notable big run was to every site where a hen harrier had been poisoned or otherwise destroyed, to preserve grouse shoots; that was for Chris Packham’s charity, Wild Justice. Photograph: Joann Randles/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘I made people laugh straight away’ … Henry Morris. They are purported to be a sitting member of the UK Parliament and have been leaking reams of sensitive information from the heart of the Conservative government for the last three years. He thinks a lot about the role of parody in the age of disinformation, the point at which exaggeration for moral effect just feeds into nobody knowing what is and isn’t true.

From the outside, it’s quite funny, a journalist driving six hours from London to come back with a lot of wrong details and some quotes from neighbours about how nice Morris is.He arrived in London as a guy who could run 110 miles without stopping, “over the Cleveland hills as well; there’s more ascent in it than Everest”, and became a personal trainer. I kept thinking: ‘You’re sitting in the House of Lords and I can run rings around you in an argument if I have to. True Stories from the Heart of British Politics, which is really sprightly, droll and powered by deep disillusionment. From Brexit to Covid, parties to pig culling, the Conservative government has lurched from crisis to crisis.

Join the mystery MP as he drunk-texts Liz Truss after a crate of WKD, accompanies Jacob Rees-Mogg (and his kids) to picket a foodbank, takes on the French in the ‘Trawler Wars’, and euthanises Rishi Sunak’s dog – and that’s just October. With a front-row seat on the, erm, backbenches, the Secret Tory MP has picked up on all the petty rivalries, bad decision-making and scandalous affairs that Whitehall has to offer.The 2019 Conservative MPs are self-interested, they’re corrupt, they’re mean-spirited, largely stupid and, as far as I can tell, filling their helicopters and firing up the shredders before they get booted out at the next election. Nobody was in any doubt that it was parody, but somehow, between the dense and granular detail, and the playful, insidery tone, people thought he was very close to the action; a special adviser, maybe? The Diary of a Secret Tory MP is an outrageous spoof of the classic political journal that pulls back the Lulu Lytle curtains to expose extraordinary goings-on at Westminster across a tumultuous twelve months. He is still personal training (remotely), chopping logs, learning Welsh and working on a sitcom idea.

It was through Abbey Shakespeare Players that he met his wife in his early 20s, but “I was a bit wild at the time, getting into all sorts of scrapes, so she wasn’t having anything to do with me then. Henry Morris couldn’t be further from the Westminster bubble, but for years he has lampooned MPs online. Encouraged by the Times columnist and author Caitlin Moran, who was one of his gym clients, he turned his next Twitter persona into a book, The Diary of a Secret Tory MP: (Almost! They currently hold the Conservative Party conference 'WKD Blue Challenge' title, after decimating Ken Clarke's infamous seven bottle record which had stood for thirteen years.Join the mystery MP as he drunk-texts Liz Truss after a crate of WKD, accompanies Jacob Rees-Mogg (and his kids) to picket a foodbank, takes on the French in the 'Trawler Wars', and euthanises Rishi Sunak's dog - and that's just October. Into that happy but high-stakes scene, Morris dropped a hand grenade last Wednesday: a video revealing that the Secret Tory, a Twitter account lampooning Conservatives from a thousand directions, has been him all along. He went to the University of Manchester to study comparative religion, moving to London in his late 20s, “because Ellie was there”. Morris started masquerading, too, as the Papua New Guinea Courier’s UK correspondent, and those columns – an outsider’s dry amusement cut with the howling indignation of the real UK citizen having to live through this clown show – are some of my favourite chronicles of our dark times.

As his personal training business grew, he was working at a gym with two friends who “were also reformed characters; they’d been in even more scrapes than I had when I was younger. The anchor didn’t really know what to make of him – what is this regular person doing inside the commentariat? I chose a gym in north London, picked up a load of clients straight away and suddenly I was mixing with all these illustrious people. A school friend, Benjamin Harvey, collaborates on the videos “and ended up tweeting it on Ellie’s due date. All my mates back home were really clever and sharp, and working behind a till; all they’d need to do is move to London and they would be earning six figures.He and Ellie started Field Maneuvers, a no-frills rave spanning a weekend, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. A modern day polymath, they enjoy bloodsports, destabilising liberal democracy and several non-executive directorships, including one at Southern Water where they claim to have been responsible for over three-hundred beach closures in 2022 alone. Meanwhile Ellie was working on dance music shows for BBC Radio 1, and Morris “got to know loads of people in the music industry who had two or three pretty lame anecdotes about the time they did something wacky. Maybe I’m being unfair, but she looks at him as if he is sort of unpredictable and unsanitary, like a bird in an airport. Over the next year or so, though, the adage of master satirist Chris Morris started to weigh on him.