What I struggle to understand, I say to Danny Kruger in his office at Reform UK HQ, is why a serious Conservative, with a glittering future like yours, would defect to a party led by Nigel Farage? Indeed, the defection of Kruger, a heavy-weight on the Conservative right who served on the front bench and been tipped as a possible future leader, was seen as a major coup for Reform, catching commentators off-guard. Unlike previous deserters – Andrea Jenkyns, Jake Berry, Nadine Dorries – he was a sitting MP in a safe Tory seat. Plus, he was untarnished by the boisterous excesses of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
But we’ve been around the houses a few times on this. He’s talked about his philosophy (Burkean), his Christianity (evangelical), thrown out words like “family”, “community”, “nation”. He’s asserted (confusingly) that the Tories are “over” but “not dead”, that politics is mostly “gut feeling … mostly vibes – isn’t it?” Now, after a pause, Kruger sits back and fixes me with a blue-eyed grin: “Humans are pack animals,” he says. “You need to know who top dog is, otherwise the other dogs fight each other. That’s what we get in Tory and Labour. Because there’s a weakness at the top.”
In a nutshell, then, Farage is what drew Kruger to Reform. And when you think about it, Farage is all there is to Reform. Or was, until recently, when their polling was boosted by all the rats fleeing the Tory ship. The Faragists drained their pints, stubbed out their cigars, and got down to some party-building. For instance, in an effort to persuade voters they are more than a protest group, Reform have abandoned their reckless promise of £90bn in tax cuts, stressing instead the need to do sensible things like reduce national debt.
Meanwhile, Kruger is heading up the party’s department for preparing for government. “The characterisation of Reform a year ago – basically one man and an iPhone – is not the case any more,” he says. “It’s one man with a very professional setup. Operationally, the party has become properly constituted, formalised with a party board, legal structure, all the things that a grown-up political party needs.”
Here, I am struck by another thought. It’s not just Farage that attracted Kruger. It’s the great big policy vacuum behind Farage. Like a property developer eyeing a brownfield site, Kruger sensed opportunity. Because Kruger is a font of ideas. Not all are stable, not all are consistent, and not all will last the course, if his extraordinary career trajectory is anything to go by.
At first glance, the white-haired, softly spoken, 51-year-old – who wears the same crumpled wool suit, white shirt and mustard tie each of the three times we meet – might seem patrician in the traditional One Nation mould. He was educated at Eton, at Edinburgh, has a DPhil from Oxford. He founded the prison charity Only Connect, and not only worked for David Cameron in opposition, but was responsible for his famous “hug a hoodie” speech. Oh and guess what? His mum is cookery writer Prue Leith, the colourful judge on The Great British Bake Off.
To be fair, Kruger has always had a sense of who might be top dog. After Cameron, he was Boris Johnson’s political secretary, before becoming an MP, then a defence minister. He ran Robert Jenrick’s campaign to succeed Rishi Sunak, but insists, “I was happy that Kemi Badenoch won. If I had chosen an alternative, it was her.” What frustrated him was Badenoch’s failure to “hit the ground running” and then her failure to do anything at all. A year passed: “Labour collapsed; Reform rose. The Tories did nothing.”
So, over the long hot summer, he walked the fields around his Wiltshire home. He sat mulling in his sitting room, took calls from his friends in Reform. Among them: James Orr, a don in Cambridge’s faculty of divinity. Orr was working informally for Reform, but now has an official advisory role, recruiting “highly able individuals” to party ranks. Kruger shares Orr’s vision for a “new politics”, which would see a realignment of party lines, bringing in sync Blue Labour – culturally conservative “old left” – and the populist “new right”. Orr’s presence, Kruger says, “was another confirmation that the philosophy of Reform is the one I’m comfortable with”. (By the way, Orr’s influence on the new right is substantial: JD Vance, the US vice-president, describes him as his “intellectual mentor” and “my British Sherpa”; Politico calls him “the philosopher king”; his positions include opposing abortion at any stage of pregnancy and admiring US gun laws. If Farage were to get to No 10, he has said, he will have to do “very unpopular things”.)
While Kruger insists there was no one lightning bolt of clarity – “it was more a gathering conclusion, which crystallised in August” – it’s important to mention the hot night that month that Kruger drove to the Cotswolds to join Vance in his holiday house for a barbecue. They drank beer, talked Christianity. Kruger found him “gentle, personable. He listens as well as talks.” He’s impressed by what Vance had made of his tough upbringing – detailed in the book Hillbilly Elegy – but also his real-world military experience; “his intelligence”. Not long after, Kruger returned Vance’s hospitality by giving him a personal tour of the Palace of Westminster.
Today we are on the 14th floor of Millbank Tower, the modernist block in Westminster, where even the lift stinks of cigar smoke. My questions cover recent events. Such as, why was the Reform MP Sarah Pochin given a free pass for saying that seeing black and Asian people in adverts “drove her mad”? (Answer: “It’s about intention. Sarah’s mistake was that she didn’t mean what it sounded like.”). What is your personal view of overturning the legal status of those given indefinite leave to remain? “Indefinite leave to remain was never a promise of permanent settlement. It’s what it sounds like – indefinite leave to remain: it’s in government’s hands whether they continue it or not.” Should women be sent back to countries like Afghanistan and Iran? “If it’s safe to do so.”
There are also observations I don’t get to put to him – such as whether he’s noticed how many of the young men in Reform’s press conference team had chosen to have Hitler Youth hair – because we get stuck into his views and his responses come in thick and fast. It’s like handling fissile material.
First, flags. I heard British writer Zadie Smith recounting how she drove from Cambridge to London recently and was alarmed to see that every village en route was decked out with St George’s and union flags. She felt that was a sign of national crisis. Even before I’ve finished the question, Kruger is nodding in fierce agreement. “Yes. It reflects the fear and insecurity in society – but it’s a legitimate fear and quite a noble statement by ordinary people who believe in their nation and want to proclaim it. The waving of a flag is a pacific way of asserting identity and belonging. Wherever the flag is planted, people – the majority of that community – stand for the values and traditional ideas of our nation. A country in crisis has to lean on its traditional symbols.”
But was there a spontaneous uptake of the flag all over the country? Or is Reform putting flags in people’s hands, while pressing the bruises of division in order to gain power? “When you say ‘pressing the bruise’, you could say ‘respecting the bruise’,” he says. “Acknowledging it. Saying, ‘You’re hurting here, and we are going to treat it.’” He says I should worry about the cause, not the consequence. That anger is caused by a dysfunctional state, massive migration, economic and wage stagnation, a breakup of communities with their traditional industries. “People are waving flags to say, ‘We want our country back.’”
Isn’t it an import from the US, though, specifically Trump’s Maga America? “I dispute that,” Kruger says. “I recognise there’s a bit of a conscious echo. But remember America is British.”
I look up from my notebook and frown. Are you sure you meant to say that “America is British?”
“Yeah, go on, definitely. Trump, JD, they all explicitly say, ‘We derive our ideas – and certainly our political model and our political culture – from Britain.’ And, ‘What a shame you guys seem to have so little pride in your own country and your own model.’ If you look back to the 18th and 19th century, we were pretty vulgar, too. There’s a lot of flag-waving. So partly, Reform is just bringing it back.”
So flag-waving is vulgar? He tells me not to be a snob. “Vulgarity is great. It’s a simple, straightforward, uncomplicated assertion of national pride, which is a good thing – if the country itself is good and democratic. If you go back to the time when America was being born, Britain was extremely triumphalist and pleased with itself in a way that we would now regard as terribly déclassé.”
Are we talking about empire? But he’s moving into an explanation of how economics and migration are only part of the problem. The real issue, the real poison, the real fight is actually with the progressive left. The flag-waving is, yes, a deliberate hostile response to what Reform sees as “dangerous and transgressive ideas”. These fall under “the panoply we call ‘woke’”, he explains, “a word that trivialises quite a substantial set of ideas that are not to be treated flippantly. Everything from BLM [Black Lives Matter], to trans, to the Palestinian agenda, to DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] in the workforce, to all the ideas that are undermining traditional associations of family, community and nation. Those ideas are hostile to the inherited understandings of how we belong, and how we relate to each other in society. So: hostility to traditional families, hostility to the idea of rootedness in place, hostility to nations.”
There is almost too much in here to unpick. I query what he means by “hostile” and Kruger’s tone turns grave. “I’d love your readers to properly believe me when I say this: I have great respect for the people who are trying to make a better society on the left. Their motivations are decent. The problem is they have an ideological objection to traditional family forms – which is mothers and fathers bringing up their children, living together and staying together. They think that is inherently patriarchal, oppressive, problematic.” Kruger does not say outright that he is against gay marriage or parenting – on the contrary, he says, “It’s not for me to judge people’s marriages or love lives –at all.” And yet, and yet he believes fiscal policy should benefit, “what we think is right for most people”. That suggests a hierarchy, with his idealised nuclear family at the top.
I remember a New Statesman piece that listed the words Kruger used to described the left: “enemy”, “parasite”, “malignant growth”, “gnostic”, a “false faith”, a “lethal threat”. Put to Kruger, he replied that “policing language is a trick of the left”.
Half of all teenagers grow up in broken homes, he says, “because we have a fiscal system that rewards and incentivises family breakdown”. Most countries have a more family system, he insists, and that’s what he wants to see here: “A system that is more pro-couple, more pro-children.”
I know from the policy positions of the splinter group he had with Miriam Cates called The New Conservatives, that he has strong views on traditional family. But I suggest that he wouldn’t be here today if marriages didn’t sometimes fall apart. After all, his own mother had a 13-year affair with his father, the author Rayne Kruger, who was married to Leith’s mother’s best friend. “Well, quite, exactly,” he says. “I’m the child of an adulterous affair. Thank you for raising that. My wife was also brought up by a single mum.” (Emma Kruger’s father died suddenly when she was five).
What about Farage, whose first marriage ended in divorce ? Would the way he lives represent all Kruger’s values? “So, listen: you’re challenging me as a Christian, and as a Christian I don’t judge people – how they live, who they live with, who they sleep with.” However, he continues, “I’m interested, as a politician, in setting the framework that makes for a better, healthier and happier society. Which I think is one in which people are supported to do what most people want to do: settle down with one partner, live with them for the rest of their lives, bring children up together.”
We talk about Christianity, because although he was raised by atheist parents, he converted when he met Emma in his 20s and she gave him a copy of CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Religion is now a major part of his life. – as set out in his 2023 book Covenant. He is Church of England, but the Anglican leadership irritate him because they are too leftwing. Was Jesus a socialist, I ask. He laughs sardonically. “He is a Palestinian as well.” OK, so a Palestinian socialist?
“I think that socialism is in heaven,” he says. “The problem with socialists is they don’t accept the fall of man. They try to create heaven on Earth with the assumption that if we somehow just got our institutions or culture right, we could be synonymous beings and all behave nicely to each other.” Wait, I say, checking I have heard correctly. Heaven is socialist? “Heaven is a socialist state,” he says. “The effort of socialists is to bring heaven on Earth, with the state in the position of God. That is not a good idea. That’s because no state of human beings can be all good or all powerful.”
We move on to the conflict in Israel and Gaza, because he’s declared Palestine woke and I’d like to know how. He says the position of Israel is important to our politics in the UK, but also the west in general, “because it stands for an idea of the nation and of western civilisation being something worth defending. [Israel] is fighting the battle for all of us in the Middle East.”
Kruger does not believe that Israel is committing genocide in the region; he says all deaths in Gaza are the responsibility of Hamas. Nor does he feel Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has gone too far. “The children wouldn’t die if Hamas was not a security threat to Israel,” he argues. “I can’t judge the precise tactics of particular IDF operations. I can well imagine that there have been atrocities and excesses, as happen in wartime.” Is there no price too great in terms of human life for the elimination of Hamas? “Well, if that price is the elimination of Israel, then nothing is too great.”
Later he tells me how much he likes the “Gaza independents” as he calls them, who sit behind him in the Commons. “They all seem very gentle individuals. The fact they have these views which I find appalling is secondary on a personal level,” he says. “But I don’t get very wound up at work.” He describes Naz Shah, the Labour MP for Bradford West, as “my good friend”: “I dedicated my Spectator award for speechmaker of the year to her,” he says. “She’s such a brilliant MP.”
He shifts uncomfortably when I ask what Reform’s policy is on abortion. “To maintain the 1967 Act. Nigel has said he thinks the term limit of 24 weeks is too high. So we’d bring that down.” To what? “Look, I don’t know.”
He has said women don’t have absolute autonomy over their bodies. “Well, they don’t,” he exclaims, “unless you think they should be able to terminate a healthy baby up to term. At some point on the journey from conception to birth, the baby acquires rights, yes? Therefore a pregnant woman doesn’t have absolute bodily autonomy.” So what would his term limit be? “I’m not sure I have one,” he says, stalling. “Look, I got in trouble speaking about abortion before. I’m actually somebody who accepts the settlement we have. I mean, how it’s implemented – the requirement on women to demonstrate the necessity for it – that is for doctors. I regret the numbers of abortions we have. I think it is tragic.” When I say it is difficult being a woman, he replies, “I was going to say, ‘Tell me about it,’ but you would have to tell me about it, of course.”
Another concern for him is the birth rate “and fertility” in this country. “So many women are not having children – that’s a problem.” He tells me I should have a view on this, and when I suggest it’s the personal choice of the woman having children, he looks perplexed. “As a society, you might be concerned about the fact that we are basically disappearing.”
Are we? “Yes!”
He starts talking about Sir David Attenborough now. and I see a pattern in Kruger’s ability to stretch points to the extreme. “Attenborough thinks human beings are the problem,” he argues. “He thinks it will be better if human beings didn’t exist. And that is the problem with the green cult: it’s essentially anti-human.”
This view that the world was overpopulated was one that Kruger’s father held in the 1970s. “They thought there were too many children, so it would be wrong to bring another child into the world.” Although he “regrets” that they held that position, it was, happily, the thinking behind their decision to adopt his sister in 1975. He briefly tells the story. When he was one, his parents heard through friends of an 18-month-old baby in Paris that had been adopted from Phnom Penh. The adopted mother had died, and the father couldn’t cope – and that was enough for his parents. They rushed to Paris and brought home Li-Da.
She is now a film-maker and runs a charity that reconnects Cambodian families scattered around the world by the war. “We are close,” Kruger says. “I can’t remember a time before her.” He adds that she chose to adopt two children of her own.
Both Kruger’s parents were originally from South Africa. The family settled in the Cotswolds, in an old rectory with dogs, cats “and a gerbil that I set free but that the cat then ate”. Childhood was happy. But as both parents worked running their joint business in London, the children were left three nights a week with the nanny. At weekends, the house filled with political friends, some “Bevanite”, some ministers in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet. Kruger senior, who died in 2002, had as a young man been an anarchist. He shifted rightwards as he got older and was 50 by the time his son was born, “and very Conservative”. He was a big authority in the house, “gentle but firm; never raised his voice”. Growing up, Kruger emulated his father by being bookish and quiet. It’s only in later years that he became more gregarious, like his mother. Kruger won’t share Leith’s political views, “because that would not be right”. What he will say is that she is a “very nice mum. Both attentive and loving, but also pretty hands-off. She never tried to direct us.” I ask what she thought of his decision to join Reform? She was “fine”, “very supportive”, “perfectly happy with the move”. Does he watch Bake Off? “No.”
* * *
Our second meeting is in Kruger’s office in the Commons, a little room with two desks and some wartime military posters. He is talking to me with one eye on the television so he can keep track of the debate in the chamber.
School – Eton – was “obviously a very political place”, he says, where he struggled in the early years “doing all these subjects I was rubbish at”. He didn’t like team sports and hated the locker room. “I just don’t like being among boys in sort of …” he inhales deeply through his nose. Macho environment? “Yes. I prefer tennis.” He remembers the school’s ritual humiliation: the reading out of results in graded order, how his scholar cousin in the same year would be first or second out of 259, “and I would be 249th”. It doesn’t sound like he much enjoyed the place, so I am surprised he’s sent his son there. “I didn’t really think very hard about it,” he says. “They all went to state primary, which we were happy with.”
Is it true he edited a magazine called Intercourse at university? “It was us being flippant,” he laughs. “We originally called it Discourse but correctly thought that was a very boring title.” He pauses before volunteering that it went from “pretentious to pornographic” featuring three women students, nude. “I’m sure it was a bit more read as a result.”
Has he ever watched pornography? “I’ve seen it, yeah.” Is that different from watching it? “Well, watching it implies some sort of voluntary act.” He stalls. “Which I think I’ll duck as a topic, Charlotte, if you don’t mind.” He continues: “To me, it’s ubiquitous. It’s everywhere. It’s unavoidable. I mean, I totally get the appeal. But I think it’s a problem in our society, how ubiquitous pornography is.”
We get on to his sharing a house with the journalist Mary Wakefield in his 20s and then to the subject of her husband, Dominic Cummings. He tells me Cummings has had a couple of dinners with Farage. “Obviously, they did not get along during the Brexit campaign, difficult for almost everybody, but Dominic wants Nigel to succeed.” He says, by the by, that Cummings has also tried to help Labour’s Morgan McSweeney. Why would he do both? “He wants somebody to grip the dysfunctional state we have.”
* * *
Before his jump to Reform, Kruger says he made another “slightly bizarre leap” in 2008 when he left politics to run his charity Only Connect. He’d founded it with Emma – who’d already been running prison theatre projects, going in day in, day out as a volunteer – and was initially attracted to it “as an abstract idea”.
Kruger believes in prisons. In fact, he thinks there should be more of them. It’s just the current system is broken. “The stories we hear of what these guys [go through]. It’s criminal – literally.” All the time he sees the freshly released walking into society with no addresses, no idea where to go. Often, “they wander back to the prison”. Only the other day a prison officer told him about a man released from Wormwood Scrubs who came back to the gatehouse and knocked on the reinforced glass. He said, “Excuse me, where is the community?” And the prison officer said, “What do you mean?’ He said, ‘I thought I was being released into the community?’”
Does Kruger get angry? “Only with my own incompetence. There’s a sort of Basil Fawlty quality to me at home, my wife says.” He won’t give me an example. “You’re going to have to imagine. Obviously, I’m human.”
He and Emma met “properly” in 2000 and then had an on-off “fairly complicated romance” until they married in 2007. “She wasn’t what I thought I was looking for,” he says. “She is gregarious, lively, very Christian. If I’d designed my ideal wife at that point, I would’ve probably said someone more like me, frankly. Quieter.” I ask how he proposed. “It was a process, put it that way. It was a negotiation.”
That said, he is “thoroughly domesticated”. He changed nappies for all three children. Childcare was always split 50/50 and, “I do more cooking than Emma does.” Can Emma cook? “She’s not as … I don’t want to say anything mean.” He says their youngest son is fast turning into the family chef and then side-tracks into a monologue about how the myth of the 1950s housewife was a historical aberration because actually, before that, women had full economic roles.
With the kids he’ll watch TV – Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Modern Family, which he loves “although obviously I largely deplore its politics”. Who is his favourite character? “They are all very good. As ever, the normal dad is the usual Homer Simpson characterisation, a bit of a doofus, which I regret. I mean, the doofusisation of dads in popular culture is to blame for a lot of our problems. Because there’s no honour in dadness any more. Dad jokes, Dad dancing, I mean.” He looks depressed.
Is he a feminist? “No, because I think the word has become an exaggerated sort of anti-man thing. Do I think women should have equal rights, yes. But increasingly, it’s become a code for an anti-family doctrine.”
There are two possible problems with Kruger’s switch to Reform. First, East Wiltshire is a Tory safe seat – Reform came fourth in 2024. Is he worried he might be kicked out? “Yes. But my seat was at risk either way.” The second is that if Farage were to fall under a bus tomorrow, isn’t there a danger that the whole Reform project collapses? Kruger admits that is a “terrible thought”, and given that he’s put all his faith in Farage, “we don’t like to think about that”.
He is on good terms with former colleagues in the Conservatives. Defection was hard in that “you’re basically betraying a whole bunch of people”, but he’s “very pleased” with the friendliness, and “all credit to the Conservatives, actually, for not being vicious”.
So, no one was upset? “No, no.” OK, not totally no one: “I mean, obviously there are some people who definitely are hurt and disappointed.” These were mostly local Conservatives; people who’d gone out in the rain canvassing, door knocking, raising donations, good friends who “believed in me and selected me”. Those people were more – how can he put it? – “directly hostile” than colleagues in parliament. Also, Boris Johnson texted to say he was “dismayed”. Why? “Because he thinks Farage is not sufficiently pro-Ukraine.”
Is he conscious of a creeping Islamophobia in general conversation, particularly on the right? I suggest that it’s pernicious and surprising, every bit as dangerous as the drawing room fascism of the 30s. “I think your surprise should be moderated by the reality of enormous growth in Islam in our country over the last couple of decades,” he says. “This [Islamophobia] is a response to demographic change. Across the nation, people are seeing total transformation of their communities, and they’re also seeing a very ugly and very threatening assertion of a militant Islam, which relates to all of the stuff we’ve been talking about foreign policy, but also how we live in our own country, which is deeply illiberal and should be concerning to people who, like you, think of themselves as good feminists.” This does not feel so far from the “great replacement” conspiracy.
He asks if I saw a piece in the New Statesman called What Did We Learn Over Our Summer Holidays? in which an anonymous Blue Labour insider said only Nigel Farage could broker a peace settlement between the white working class and Muslim communities. “Because no one else has their attention.”
Does he want to be prime minister one day? “I fantasise about that,” he admits, “but I think the country’s had enough Old Etonians for now.” He relaxes in his chair. “I am curiously at peace about this decision. Weird, isn’t it?”
The best public interest journalism relies on first-hand accounts from people in the know.
If you have something to share on this subject, you can contact us confidentially using the following methods.
Secure Messaging in the Guardian app
The Guardian app has a tool to send tips about stories. Messages are end to end encrypted and concealed within the routine activity that every Guardian mobile app performs. This prevents an observer from knowing that you are communicating with us at all, let alone what is being said.
If you don't already have the Guardian app, download it (iOS/Android) and go to the menu. Select ‘Secure Messaging’.
SecureDrop, instant messengers, email, telephone and post
If you can safely use the Tor network without being observed or monitored, you can send messages and documents to the Guardian via our SecureDrop platform.
Finally, our guide at theguardian.com/tips lists several ways to contact us securely, and discusses the pros and cons of each.
