‘I think they were expecting an Oxbridge, suited academic’
The man behind the Secret Tory Twitter account has been revealed as a personal trainer living in Wales. Bethany Gavaghan has been speaking to him...
THE man behind the Secret Tory Twitter account has revealed he wanted to hold people to account for doing “bad, incompetent or stupid” things.
Henry Morris cleared the air this week when he admitted that he was the mastermind behind the twitter handle @secrettory12 or the Secret Tory account.
Despite rumours he was a well known celebrity pretending to be an anonymous Conservative, Morris is a personal trainer residing in Crymrych in west Wales.
What started as an attempt to keep people entertained in lockdown became a joke which was embraced by 200,000 twitter users following his every word.
Known for calling out the Conservative government, Morris speaks candidly on Twitter using satire to impersonate a Tory MP.
In real life Morris is a father, husband, personal trainer and aspiring sitcom writer.
Speaking to the Western Mail he said: “There’s part of you which is like, you can tell loads of funny jokes where people say this is very funny, but they don’t know who you are and you want to take credit for that,” he explained. “But I also just like moving forward, and I’ve been doing this for four years now and just thought now’s the time for a change.”
“I’ve said this a few times, there is a lot of nonsense out in the world, so this is my own way of just holding people to account when they’re doing their own things that are bad, incompetent or stupid. It doesn’t need me adding an extra dimension to the mix where a lot of people are willing to believe what I’m saying is true on top of everything else. It just muddies the water.”
Morris’ sharply anti-Conservative satire sprang to prominence as Brexit dominated the news prior to the UK’s withdrawal from the EU and the account has since taken a life of its own.
The personal trainer announced that he would be revealing his true identity towards the end of May, and anticipation had been brewing ever since. Thousands of people jumped on the bandwagon online trying to guess who the Secret Tory might be, and Morris admitted that he was not confident in how the news would be received.
“I thought it might be a bit more negative, but ‘I can’t believe you’ve not got a mullet’ was a common response,” he said. “And a lot of people just couldn’t believe that it was a normal person.”
But Morris was not in complete hiding. Although his name was not widely known until recently, he has told individual people gradually since he set the account up.
“A lot of my friends know,” he said. “They kept it quite a good secret for at least the first three years. But in the last year, people who knew me inevitably told more people.
“My wife’s family, it was quite a struggle trying to get them to keep it quiet but they were pretty good. And my close circle did, they were always showing me when things went viral and taking the mick out of me.”
After his unmasking, what next? “It figures if the jokes I was doing as a Tory MP were funny, I can carry on being funny as Henry Morris, unless there’s some secret about being a Tory that makes you funnier,” he said. “I fired off a few tweets yesterday basically in the style of as I did it in before and actually it did just as well coming out of my mouth pretending a Tory MP’s going to come and kick my head in. And I said a few political things in the news this morning and actually it seemed to get more traction than it did before but I honestly don’t think it will make much difference.
“Revealing myself and looking like I do I think more people will look at me as more of a character if that makes sense.
“I think they were all expecting some kind of Oxbridge, suited academic. I love making people laugh, it’s great fun. It’s great to find out that I can do it by getting 200,000 followers from a flat start where all the other comparable accounts have got TV shows or their own columns and stuff.”
There has been so much interest in the jokes which Morris shared that he also published a book in 2022, titled The Diary of a Secret Tory MP: (Almost!) True Stories from the Heart of British Politics, receiving positive reviews such as those from LBC host James O’Brien and Times columnist Caitlin Moran.
But he doesn’t believe his writing journey has stopped there.
“I’m pretty confident I can carry on doing it, there’s loads of stuff I want to write. I’m trying to write a sitcom at the moment. It doesn’t really pay me very much at the moment, the writing, so I’m spending all my spare time which I don’t have very much of doing it.
“I’m basically getting up earlier and earlier each day trying to use the time.”
Before moving to Crymych, Morris was living in a council flat in Tottenham two years ago, and is originally from Leeds.
But since moving to Wales, he has never looked back. “I was in a flat during lockdown and moving here was the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m not sure I would describe my life as normal.
“I get up at five every day and I’m writing, then I’m training people on Zoom for three or four hours. I run this musical festival with my wife as well. I thought I’d moved to Wales for a quiet life but every single second of every day is accounted for.”