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

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.

He is still personal training (remotely), chopping logs, learning Welsh and working on a sitcom idea. They are purported to be a sitting member of the UK Parliament and have been leaking reams of sensitive information from the heart of the Conservative government for the last three years. 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. 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. Meanwhile Ellie was working on dance music shows for BBC Radio 1, and Morris “got to know loads of people in the music industry who had two or three pretty lame anecdotes about the time they did something wacky.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. Surprisingly literate, The Secret Tory is also behind the trenchant and insightful Papua New Guinea Courier, also available via his twitter page. 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. 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. 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.

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. Photograph: Joann Randles/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘I made people laugh straight away’ … Henry Morris. True Stories from the Heart of British Politics, which is really sprightly, droll and powered by deep disillusionment. View image in fullscreen ‘We had these baronesses, lords and millionaires coming in to the gym where I was a personal trainer.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. I’d always thought [about politicians]: ‘There are some bad apples but largely they are trying to make the world a better place. 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! 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.