“Britain is not broken,” said Danny Kruger, with the pained look of a man who believes he holds his nation’s fate in his hands, and that to save it he must turn his back on his friends. “It is badly damaged,” he went on.
Usually when Conservative MPs say this, it’s a preamble to a contortion where they’ll claim that everything was going Just Fine until July last year, but has now plunged off a cliff. But as of Monday morning, Kruger is a Reform Member of Parliament, which means that none of the mess is his fault. If only the rest of us could so easily escape the consequences of our actions.
Kruger is the seventh person to become a Reform MP although, thanks to the party’s unique approach to personnel management, his arrival brings the party’s total back to five, exactly what it was a year ago. In the same way that a man who marries his mistress creates a vacancy, the arrival of a new bottom next to Nigel Farage on the Reform benches prompts the natural question of who will be leaving the party next. In this case though Kruger had also supplied the answer, as it will quite obviously be him.
For those not familiar with him, Kruger is a sincere, kindly, evangelical soul, who clearly feels he has been sadly let down by every party leader he’s ever had. Farage meanwhile has fallen out with pretty much everyone he’s ever worked with, and who is happy to throw overboard any colleague who gets in his way. If Kruger’s defection to Reform took us by surprise, it will be nothing to the shock if he is still in the party at the next election.
Did Kruger’s arrival mean Reform was coming out against assisted dying? Farage swerved
We were in the basement of the May Fair Hotel, the sort of place where the global super-wealthy stash their mistresses. On the way in we’d been greeted by an American youth with what I can only describe as MAGA Hair, and then had our bags searched significantly more thoroughly than generally happens when we’re following mere nobodies like the prime minister. Perhaps they feared we were smuggling in the Conservative whips office in pieces.
We’d suspected a defection, and speculated about who it might be, but no one had mentioned Kruger. He was carrying a speech that was somewhat overwritten, but this was his big moment in the sun. “The Conservative Party is over,” he said. “Over as a national party, over as the principal opposition to the left.”
But this wasn’t bad news! Far from it. “The flame is passing from one torch to another,” Kruger went on. “The old torch, once so great, is guttering, held weakly in uncertain hands, but the new torch is already alight, already brighter than the one that is replacing, held aloft in firm and confident hand.” If I were hanging around on the more right-wing fringes of politics, I’d simply cut the references to torchlit processions from my speeches, but it’s entirely possible Kruger thinks Triumph Of The Will is a sequel to Shakespeare In Love.
Britain was in deep trouble, he concluded, and Farage was “our last hope.” It was a line that could only have been delivered by someone with absolutely no sense of humour.
“What’s Nigel Farage got that Kemi Badenoch hasn’t?” asked someone. “A Swiss bank account,” muttered one journalist.
“I have a very great regard for her,” Kruger said sadly, apparently shocked by the idea that his defection from Badenoch’s party and denunciation of her leadership might be interpreted in some way negatively towards her. “I like her personally.” If another politician — Farage, just to grab a name at random — had said it, it would have sounded arch. From Kruger it came across as if impossibly naive.
Kruger is a man of deep faith who wants things to have faith in. He’d believed in Boris Johnson and somehow — who could have foreseen it? — Johnson had turned out to be a touch unreliable. Now he had found a new chancer to believe in. What could go wrong?
The questions moved to the complex issue of Farage’s Clacton house, which turns out not to be his and may in another week turn out not to be in Clacton either. The position on where exactly the money came from for this property changes by the day, but Farage assured us that it was all above board. Indeed, only last week he’d consulted a lawyer who’d told him it was fine. Kruger looked across at him for a moment. Was that a sense memory of another charming leader whose story had kept changing by the hour? No! Not Nigel! Never Nigel!
Someone asked about Saturday’s march by fans of Tommy Robinson. “The vast majority of people who turned up were good ordinary decent people,” Farage said. Did Kruger at this point wonder again about who exactly he was going to be hanging out with in the coming months?
Well, he needn’t worry there. “There’s no racial prejudice in Reform,” Farage cheerily told us. Although there do seem to be an awful lot of people with “ex-Reform” in their bios who hold some pretty unpleasant views. “One of the things that really shocked people,” he went on, “was how diverse our conference was.” Without wishing to quibble, I attended both days of Reform’s conference, and you would need an electron microscope to measure the size of my shock at the level of diversity in the crowd. It was exactly as diverse as I had expected it to be.
Did Kruger’s arrival mean Reform was coming out against assisted dying? Farage swerved, but the party’s turn against vaccines suggests that under a Reform government, people of all ages will be able to die without any assistance at all.
We came back to the question of Nigel’s house. Was he willing to repeat the statement he’d given the previous week on how it was paid for?
“I’d be slightly careful what you say,” the Reform leader replied, in no way menacingly. “I’ve answered the question. Everything that has been done is legal. I’m not going to say any more. And I would advise people not to say in print or anywhere else that I have done something to break the law in terms of this subject. I’d advise that quite strongly.” Kruger looked sideways again. Truly, nothing communicates confidence in your position more convincingly than a pre-emptive threat to sue a journalist for asking a question.
