True Stories from the Heart of British Politics, which is really sprightly, droll and powered by deep disillusionment.

Henry Morris couldn’t be further from the Westminster bubble, but for years he has lampooned MPs online.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. 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. From Brexit to Covid, parties to pig culling, the Conservative government has lurched from crisis to crisis.

Surprisingly literate, The Secret Tory is also behind the trenchant and insightful Papua New Guinea Courier, also available via his twitter page.

A school friend, Benjamin Harvey, collaborates on the videos “and ended up tweeting it on Ellie’s due date. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. The anchor didn’t really know what to make of him – what is this regular person doing inside the commentariat? 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! The Secret Tory reached the end of its natural life, but there is more to come, I feel certain; Morris is not a man who goes home before he has achieved his objective.That sense intensified after he first started his Twitter account, a parody of the Conservative MP Mark Francois, which he did “desperately hoping that some of these Tories have got more about them, but they’re really not very bright”.

I’d always thought [about politicians]: ‘There are some bad apples but largely they are trying to make the world a better place. Over the next year or so, though, the adage of master satirist Chris Morris started to weigh on him. 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. 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. I went to London completely braced, thinking, ‘Everyone is really switched on and really fast and sharp,’ and I got there and thought, ‘Everyone’s just the same as the people I know back home, maybe not as funny, but they’re doing much more interesting stuff.

Henry Morris should look a lot more stressed than he does, though it’s true that this is the first time I’ve met him (over Zoom), and he has such confident hair that it would be hard to see uncertainty beneath it. 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 one objective is to destroy the Tories; amplify their ludicrous behaviour and turn it into comedy by making it grotesque.