Man behind spoof Tory MP Twitter account unmasked
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The creator of a spoof Tory MP Twitter account set up to attack the Government over Brexit has been unmasked as a personal trainer from Wales.
Henry Morris revealed himself as the person behind The Secret Tory, which has almost 200,000 followers and routinely lampoons senior Conservatives.
In recent weeks he has posted messages mocking Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock, and taken aim at the party’s record on river pollution.
Many of the social media site’s users were taken in by the account and believed that its posts represented the private frustrations of a real Tory MP.
‘I could make people laugh’
Mr Morris, who is originally from Yorkshire, unveiled himself as the author of the posts in a video that ridiculed Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg.
In it, he described his time in charge of the account as “amateurishly lampooning” what he called the “proto-fascist antics” of the Conservatives.
In an interview with the BBC, he said: “I inadvertently started parodying Mark Francois at the height of Brexit when I was bored between training clients in my gym.
“I remember people in the gym laughing about the account without knowing it was me, and it was very nice to have my hunch confirmed that I could make people laugh.
“Other people discover they’re good at things like ballet or darts. Turns out I’m very good at pretending to be a Tory MP.”
Mr Morris said he was “sorry” if people felt “cheated” at finding out that the account was not the work of a real Conservative backbencher.
He added: “It’s got a lot more to do with the behaviour of the people sitting in Westminster than my skills as a con artist.”
Mark ne Francois pas
The marathon runner set up the account in 2019 solely as a spoof of Mr Francois, the chairman of the European Research Group.
It was originally called “Mark ne Francois pas” and mocked the senior MP for, among other things, his history in the Territorial Army.
In 2020 Mr Francois told the BBC that he found the account “actually quite funny” and was “thick skinned” enough to take a good-humoured joke.
The account then changed its name to Michael Govern Ready, a play on words about Mr Johnson’s claims that he had secured an “oven-ready” Brexit deal.
It finally morphed into The Secret Tory and became more aggressive in its political attacks on the Tories “rather than just playing the jester”.
But Mr Morris admitted that “if people come for you to be funny and you’re being angry, it doesn’t work”.
“People are forever telling me they preferred it when I was doing jokes about Mark ne Francois pas’s mock-Tudor carport and breakfasts of Sugar Puffs made with a can of Monster. I hope I’ve got the balance better now, but who knows?” he added.
