Danny Kruger

A possible champion? Certainly a heartening development...

Yesterday, Danny Kruger MP joined Reform UK.

Having been peripherally on my radar for several years – he is co-chair of the ‘Beyond Pills’ All-Party Parliamentary Group – Danny Kruger jumped into sharper focus just before the summer recess with a profound speech in Parliament in a debate entitled The Future of The Church of England. Not many MPs bothered to turn up, but it is a seminal tract, and I commend it to the readership of this blog. You can find the full text of his speech in Hansard.

A few weeks previously, he had written eloquently and succinctly about the House of Commons passing some sinister new laws:

Going further back, Kruger was an active participant in the ‘Coronapanic Debacle and Excess Deaths’¹ debate secured by Andrew Bridgen in the last Parliament back in April 2024. HART’s excellent write-up can be found here and provides some useful additional context and links. Kruger’s Beyond Pills APPG activities gave his withering criticism of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) substantial heft – there is enough material here for one of my separate ‘HART Leeks (sic)’ posts, as many paths seem to lead to the MHRA’s door.

I digress. Does any of this matter? After all, Reform is inundated with defectors who wish to leave their respective sinking ships, causing some resentment from those that (continuing the metaphor) piloted the Good Ship in its early days when the going was rough. Paraphrasing various comments I have heard in the last 24 hours: “Who knows him? What will he bring to the party?”.

It’s a fair line of questioning. There is a secular angle to this, and – speaking from the heart and from a faith perspective – a non-secular one. The secular one is well-covered by the usual commentators, including a rapid response bulletin by James Heale in the Spectator. Here's an excerpt:

Today’s defection is different from [previous defections]. Danny Kruger has been an instrumental figure in the machinations of the Tory right over the past two years. He is a serious thinker with numerous writings on themes around community and country. That he has now chosen to quit today will be interpreted within the Conservatives as perhaps the gravest warning yet that the next election could be fatal for the world’s most successful political party. Intelligent and ambitious right wingers will be left to draw their own conclusions as to which vehicle offers them the best chance for preferment and success.

If that gets written in the Spectator, it will be read by 'The Tory Right', but also will be in the minds of the various journalists that write the newspapers. But more important than that – to me at least – is which wordly vessel (i.e. being wordly, they will all be flawed) for Christians to associate themselves with. All the main parties have flipped and flopped on some very important issues. I’ve covered idealogical purity in a previous post; it is perfectly possible to become a hermit and say 'a plague on all your houses'. But that's not going to help shape the world that my daughters are growing up in. So if one of the most openly devout Christian politicians in the country chooses to go with Reform, it is meaningful.

There are a lot of voters out there who have not yet grappled with some of hard edges of the parties that they have aligned themselves with. At future elections, they have choices. They can vote Labour, whose deputy leader who once stated that men can grow a cervix. They can vote for the Liberal Democrats, whose leader said that women "quite clearly" can have a male sex organ (and – unconnected to this utterance – utterly failed the postmasters in the Horizon IT scandal as Post Office Minister in the Coalition Government). They can vote Conservative, a party in power from 2010 to 2024 that allowed Gaia worship to be enshrined in law via tightening – rather than abolishing – the Climate Change Act 2008, and of course facilitated the destruction of lives and life chances – along with the best part of £400 billion – as part of the Coronapanic Debacle fallout. Or they can vote for the Greens, who want to go further than our current Fabian autocrats and want to even further impoverish the nation by imposing their decarbonisation cult as a de facto new state religion.

Or they can vote for a party that can admit past mistakes, allows internal debate and has leading members who are willing to state, publicly, that only Christianity is 'up to it' when it comes to "withstand[ing] our enemies, bringing society together and tam[ing] the technium".

So yes. He may not yet be the Champion Of The World (and I have no idea whether or not he is any good at poaching pheasants, though an escapade in Richmond Park would indicate that he would be better off avoiding live animal interactions on the campaign trail), but I am hopeful that one day we may look back and note that a paradigm shift occurred on the Day that Danny joined Reform.

1. Yes, that’s not what they called it, but that is what they should have called it.