DANNY Kruger has defected from the Tories to Reform UK, becoming one of a growing number of Conservatives joining Nigel Farage’s party.
The Eton and Edinburgh University-educated son of TV personality Prue Leith has been an MP since 2019.
On Monday morning, he declared that the “Conservative Party is over”.
Who is Danny Kruger?
He was first elected to Parliament at the 2019 election as the MP for Devizes, which was abolished and he won East Wiltshire at last year’s General Election.
Kruger was educated at Eton and then Edinburgh University before completing a PhD in history at Oxford University.
After university, he worked as director of research at the Centre for Policy Studies, a right-wing think tank, before graduating to the Conservative Party’s policy unit as an adviser.
He then worked as the chief leader writer for The Telegraph from 2005 before leaving to work as David Cameron’s speechwriter in opposition in 2006. In this role, he made his first mark in politics by penning the “hug a hoodie” speech which was intended to put across the future prime minister’s vision for "compassionate conservatism”.
He left Cameron’s office in 2008 to work full time for the youth crime prevention charity Only Connect, which he helped found two years before.
A leading voice in the Brexit campaign, Kruger served as a senior fellow at the Leave-backing Legatum Institute, which he left in 2018 to work as an adviser at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, under Matt Hancock. He was then hired to work in No 10 as then prime minister Boris Johnson’s political secretary in August 2019.
Career as an MP
Kruger replaced Claire Perry O’Neill as the MP for Devizes after she stood down to become the COP26 president.
He strongly backed Dominic Cummings and journalist Mary Wakefield after an apparent breach of lockdown regulations and was himself found to have breaching the rules on wearing a face mask on public transport.
In 2021, he was appointed as parliamentary private secretary to Michael Gove, then levelling up secretary.
The following year, Kruger supported Johnson during the prime minister’s confidence vote, which he narrowly survived with the support of 58.8% of his MPs. After Gove was fired by Johnson, Kruger stepped down from his government job, saying that it should instead be Johnson quitting.
Before his defection, he was a shadow minister on the Department for Work and Pensions team in Kemi Badenoch's opposition.
What does Danny Kruger believe?
Kruger was an outspoken right-winger in the Conservative Party. After the US Supreme Court struck down the landmark abortion rights ruling in Roe v Wade, Kruger said that women did not have an “absolute right” to bodily autonomy.
He spoke at the 2023 National Conservativism Conference, where he bemoaned the “new religion” he said was gripping Britain which he characterised as a cocktail of “Marxism and narcissism and paganism, self-worship and nature-worship all wrapped up in revolution”.
At the same event, Kruger said that husbands and wives should stay together “for the sake of the children”.
Kruger is also a leading opponent of the private members’ bill for England and Wales to legalise assisted dying.
He is a convert to evangelical Christianity and has previously spoken in favour of legalising cannabis and psilocybin.
