Tory MPs requested to make unimaginable sacrifice for Nigel Farage | Politics | News | EUROtoday

Danny Kruger believes Britain’s democracy faces an “emergency” however in a quiet nook of the Palace of Westminster he’s plotting a change of the nation. The father of three grew to become the primary sitting Conservative MP to affix Reform UK in September and he has been charged with making certain the get together can begin work on altering Britain instantly if Nigel Farage turns into prime minister on the subsequent election.

This former prime aide to Conservative leaders together with David Cameron and Boris Johnson now argues solely Reform can “save the country”.

“I believe in Nigel and the philosophy of Reform, and they are the party I always wanted the Tories to be,” he says.

Just as Mr Farage’s Brexit Party stood down candidates within the 2019 election to keep away from splitting the Right-wing vote, he now pleads with Conservatives to get behind Reform.

Warning that the Tories are a “potential blocker” for a Reform victory, he says: “I think any Conservative who could see plainly what the national interest is would themselves step down – i.e. join the Reform party.”

He admits to being “terrified” on the considered Labour, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats becoming a member of forces with the Scottish and Welsh nationalists and independents to “stop Reform”.

“You can imagine them disestablishing the Church, taking us out of NATO,” he says. “I mean, the whole smorgasbord of dystopian policies that the Left hold, which are only held back at the moment by the need to appeal to Middle England, would suddenly be given full rein… I can imagine some Labour leader, Starmer or his successor, signing up to all of that to stay in Number 10.”

He is decided Reform will current a “better alternative” for the nation.

“We need a Government that actually honours the public and we need major economic reform to get prosperity going again, to liberate growth, to create wages that can sustain a family,” he says.

He is little doubt about his function as one in every of Reform’s 5 MPs, saying: “My job is to arrange us for Government.”

He is working on a plan to get legislation through a “resistant House of Lords” and to “stop judicial activism frustrating us”. A priority is to “get out of the spaghetti of international law that enables lawyers to clog up action, particularly on deportation and border security”.

This mission, he says, is “a great pleasure but it’s a daunting responsibility as well, which I’m relishing”.

In August, when back in his East Wiltshire constituency, Mr Kruger decided the time had come to break with the Conservatives.

“I’d hoped for 25 years that the Conservative party would become the party that I wanted it to be,” he says.

In the last Parliament, the Old Etonian was a leading member of the New Conservatives, a group which pushed for a tougher line on immigration. Most of its members were casualties of the 2024 election but Mr Kruger survived and Kemi Badenoch appointed him a shadow work and pensions minister.

He concluded the Tories were “over as a national party” and would not “deliver the change that’s needed – most obviously because the public have had enough of them”.

“Their public reputation is so shot that even if Winston Churchill came back as leader I don’t think he could overcome the brand problem,” he adds.

He phoned Mr Farage who came to his house and any last reservations about joining the Reform team were cast aside.

He remembers thinking: “Face facts and make the move you need to make.”

Mr Kruger, who served as Boris Johnson’s political secretary, has learned from the challenges his old boss faced when taking the reins of Government.

“He came in in a bit of a rush and there wasn’t a clearly worked out and accepted plan for the transformation that the country needs, whereas that is what we are building now and we have a year or two to do it in,” he says. “I am more optimistic and excited about this phase of our political story and certainly of my own career than I’ve ever been, because I think the country is in urgent, desperate need for change.

“And I think Reform has the capability to be that change if we do our planning right over the next year or two. It’s a very, very exciting moment full of potential and risk.”

The festive season will bring a break from frontline politics. His mother, Prue Leith, is one of Britain’s most famous cookery writers and broadcasters, and they will see each other on Christmas Day.

“Christmas is at our house this year so I’ve got to cook,” he says.

Christmas is much more than a gastronomic extravaganza for the 51-year-old.

Mr Kruger is one of the highest-profile people of faith in Parliament. He believes the “country is in a deep crisis that is political, economic, cultural and also spiritual”.

“Our roots are Christian but we’ve abandoned the roots,” he explains.

His journey to belief is also a love story.

As he puts it: “I came to believe through my now-wife, Emma, in my 20s, who helped to convert me, took me to church and gave me books to read, prayed for me, and here I am.”

Human beings, he argues, are “meaning-seeking animals”, and his life changed after reading Mere Christianity by CS Lewis, the literary don best known for writing his Chronicles of Narnia.

The Christmas story, he insists, is “for everyone”.

“Jesus came so the whole world might be saved,” he says. “He is there for us all, even if we acknowledge him or not, and for people of all faiths and no faith to understand the origin story of our culture is essential.

“That’s why it’s important to maintain the traditions of Christmas and to remember there’s more to Christmas than shopping and eating.”

As a speechwriter for David Cameron, Mr Kruger helped develop a vision for compassionate conservativism. He penned what is remembered as Cameron’s “hug-a-hoodie” speech and founded the charity Only Connect, which helps prisoners before and after release.

He does not think this makes him an odd fit in Reform.

“There’s no hang’em and flog’em tendency in Reform,” he says, claiming there is a “robust and sensible attitude to law and order”.

He wants more prisons and longer sentences but is also an earnest advocate of rehabilitation and “compassion, love, forgiveness and support”.

Far from seeing Reform as a far Right party, he considers it a force for unity in a time of division.

“The best possible defence or inoculation against the far Right is Reform,” he argues. “If you are worried about our divided society, then you’ve got to vote for the party that can unite us around a decent, respectable conservatism that addresses the very legitimate concerns of British people who are worried about mass migration and crime and who want their country back.

“They want a country which stands for the values that we inherited and we thought were intrinsic to the UK but our leaders have abandoned.”

Arguing that the “best defence against the drift to the extremes is Nigel Farage,” he says: “We have an emergency in our democracy right now, and Nigel Farage stands for what I think decent people of the mainstream in Britain want, which is, yes, radical change, but also a commitment to democratic processes, to the rule of law. Nigel will restore the proper basis of our politics.

“If he doesn’t win and we have a reversion to the centrist quagmire of Labour and the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, I fear for our democracy.”

Many former Tory MPs have now declared their assist for Reform however he has “huge respect” for a variety of Labour MPs he would like to see again his get together.

“They would bring those strong communitarian principles about solidarity, that patriotic Labour tradition which has been completely abandoned by the technocratic globalists now in charge,” he says. “I think there is clearly space within us for Labour defectors.”

But he argues Sir Keir Starmer is true to dread the considered a Reform Government.

“He’s quite right to be kept awake by the idea of Reform because we do represent a total and absolute threat, an existential threat, to his worldview, and to the sort of politics he stands for in a way the Conservatives don’t so there’s no surprise they are coming for us,” he says.

Despite the size of change he envisages, Mr Kruger – who has a portray of the conservative thinker Roger Scruton in his workplace – denies that Reform is “revolutionary”.

“We are about restoration,” he says. “We want to restore the proper basis of our politics and our country and I think that is a widely popular mission.”

The recognition of Reform’s ambitions might be examined in May’s elections to English councils and the Welsh and Scottish parliaments, however Mr Kruger has grand hopes for the emergence of the “party that I always wanted – properly patriotic, properly radical – that can restore the basis of our country and govern in the interests of the British people”.