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

Product Information

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. 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. Over the next year or so, though, the adage of master satirist Chris Morris started to weigh on him. 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.

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

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 chose a gym in north London, picked up a load of clients straight away and suddenly I was mixing with all these illustrious people. 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. 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.

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. Henry Morris couldn’t be further from the Westminster bubble, but for years he has lampooned MPs online. True Stories from the Heart of British Politics, which is really sprightly, droll and powered by deep disillusionment. 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.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?