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

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The one objective is to destroy the Tories; amplify their ludicrous behaviour and turn it into comedy by making it grotesque.

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. 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. 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. Photograph: Joann Randles/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘I made people laugh straight away’ … Henry Morris.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”. 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. 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.

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.The anchor didn’t really know what to make of him – what is this regular person doing inside the commentariat? 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. 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. 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.