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? 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.

View image in fullscreen ‘Everyone seems to be preoccupied with my mullet’ … Morris at his home in Wales. 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. 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. Over the next year or so, though, the adage of master satirist Chris Morris started to weigh on him.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. 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 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. 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.

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. Before that, he’d gone to a “not very good comprehensive school, which I hated”, then became an auxiliary nurse, “which is the hardest amount of work you can do for the least amount of money. 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. 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 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? I kept thinking: ‘You’re sitting in the House of Lords and I can run rings around you in an argument if I have to. He is still personal training (remotely), chopping logs, learning Welsh and working on a sitcom idea. Maybe I’m being unfair, but she looks at him as if he is sort of unpredictable and unsanitary, like a bird in an airport. From Brexit to Covid, parties to pig culling, the Conservative government has lurched from crisis to crisis.