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

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True Stories from the Heart of British Politics, which is really sprightly, droll and powered by deep disillusionment. He is still personal training (remotely), chopping logs, learning Welsh and working on a sitcom idea.

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. The anchor didn’t really know what to make of him – what is this regular person doing inside the commentariat? 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. The one objective is to destroy the Tories; amplify their ludicrous behaviour and turn it into comedy by making it grotesque.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.

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.

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. 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!

I know exactly what he means: there is a perception of media and political elites as operating on a higher plane, and it’s absolutely warped, but I’m not sure it’s about London – isn’t it about class? A school friend, Benjamin Harvey, collaborates on the videos “and ended up tweeting it on Ellie’s due date. 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”. My dad is very clever, he has a lot of varied interests, both my parents have, which they seem to have passed on to me.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. 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.

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. Since its inception in 2019, the account – which now has nearly 200,000 followers – has been the focus of magnetised speculation: “Retired anonymous Conservative MP, part-time arms dealer” was how he described himself, though everyone knew that wasn’t real-real. 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. 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 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. From Brexit to Covid, parties to pig culling, the Conservative government has lurched from crisis to crisis.