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. “Everyone seems to be preoccupied with my mullet,” he agrees. His wife, Ellie, is two days past her due date so their second child could show up at any minute. 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.
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. 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. Or he would write accounts of Conservative chaos in the style of Swift or Chaucer. 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? At the very least, Westminster-bubble-based. Lots of Conservative MPs were following him on Twitter; people started to slide into his DMs to congratulate him on a point well landed, or make suggestions.
