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

Product Information

Over the next year or so, though, the adage of master satirist Chris Morris started to weigh on him. Henry Morris couldn’t be further from the Westminster bubble, but for years he has lampooned MPs online. Before that, he’d gone to a “not very good comprehensive school, which I hated”, then became an auxiliary nurse, “which is the hardest amount of work you can do for the least amount of money.

Finally, though, he decided that remaining anonymous was contributing to a fake news environment and he should out himself. 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. He went to the University of Manchester to study comparative religion, moving to London in his late 20s, “because Ellie was there”. 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. 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 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. The anchor didn’t really know what to make of him – what is this regular person doing inside the commentariat? From Brexit to Covid, parties to pig culling, the Conservative government has lurched from crisis to crisis. 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.

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. Photograph: Joann Randles/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘I made people laugh straight away’ … Henry Morris. Biography: Henry Morris is a personal trainer and rave promoter, and author of the infamous Diary of a Secret Tory MP.

View image in fullscreen ‘Everyone seems to be preoccupied with my mullet’ … Morris at his home in Wales. He would tweet imagined WhatsApp messages between ministers, Alice in Wonderland fantasias that disappeared into the wilds of Liz Truss’s ignorance and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s creepiness. 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. 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!

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. 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?

View image in fullscreen ‘We had these baronesses, lords and millionaires coming in to the gym where I was a personal trainer. 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.

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. The bestselling Diary of a Secret Tory MP lifts the lid on one of the biggest periods of upheaval in recent memory (certainly since Nick Clegg broke George Osbourne's printer at the treasury) - the last twelve months of British politics. 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.The one objective is to destroy the Tories; amplify their ludicrous behaviour and turn it into comedy by making it grotesque. 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. 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. He is still personal training (remotely), chopping logs, learning Welsh and working on a sitcom idea.