Danny Kruger defects to Reform UK from Tories, with Farage putting him in charge of preparing party for government
Nigel Farage has announced that Danny Kruger has defected to Reform UK from the Tories. Kruger, MP for East Wiltshire, is a leading social conservative, and co-chaired the New Conservatives group in the last parliament with Miriam Cates.
Farage said that Kruger would be in charge of preparing the part for government.
Danny Kruger at the Reform UK conference Photograph: Reform UKShare
Updated at 06.18 EDT
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Kruger says Tories were ‘failure’ in office, they are finished as national party, but conservatism ‘isn’t over’
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Farage claims Starmer won’t be Labour leader at time of next election, and Burnham would drag party to left
Q: Do you fear Keir Starmer or Andy Burnham more at the next election?
Farage says:
It’s a very hypothetical question. You know that Keir Starmer will not be leader of the Labour party at the next election. In fact, he might not even last the next year.
If it’s Andy Burnham, you might say he’s very personable, but he also would drag Labour way to the left, and that’s not the direction the centre of gravity in this country is going. It’s going in a different direction, and it’s almost as if Westminster now, this current parliament, is so far detached from where the country is going that it’s almost not true. So I’m not bothered.
Updated at 06.58 EDT
Q: Danny, you wrote David Cameron’s ‘hug a hoodie’ speech. Do you still think that?
Kruger says he is still proud of that speech. He says it was profoundly conservative. It stressed that young people need care and support. But it was also strong on the need for proper crime to get a robust response.
Kruger criticises the way the speech was spun by Andy Coulson. He says he learned from that that you cannot expect to get two ideas in a headline.
Farage says he thinks the Conservative party is “nowhere near its electoral floor”. He thinks they will cease to be a national party after the elections next year.
Kruger says when Lee Anderson found out that Kruger was the Tory MP who was defecting, Anderson joked: “Which one of us is leaving?”
They were joking about it being ‘one in, one out”, he says.
Five Reform UK MPs were elected last year. Two of them have left (Rupert Lowe and James McMurdock), but two have now joined (Sarah Pochin and Kruger).
ShareKruger says, even if Robert Jenrick took over as Tory leader, he does not think they could now overtake Reform UK
Kruger said that that he supported Robert Jenrick for the Tory leadership, and he thought the party would be doing better now with Jenrick as leader. Jenrick wanted to take the fight to Labour immediately, he said; Kemi Badenoch thought the party needed to spend time working on a new policy platform.
But he said, if Jenrick took over now, “I don’t think he could succeed in overtaking Reform”.
ShareFarage accuses police of not taking death threats against him on TikTok seriously
At the start of the press conference Farage said that he had received explicit death threats on TikTok. He said that he had reported them to the police, but had now been told that they were not taking any action.
Asked how worried he was by these, Farage said that he knew Charlie Kirk well. Getting death threats himself was “not a very pleasant experience”, he said.
So I did challenge the police to do something, but they’ve decided this does not meet the threshold. Gosh, imagine if I make I made some joke about the trans community, probably be in real trouble.
And that is at the heart of two-tier Britain, two-tier policing, two-tier justice and two-tier Keir, and it’s one of the reasons the flags are going up all over this country.
Updated at 06.43 EDT
Kruger says he wants to ensure that if Reform UK wins the election, the civil service will implement real change.
ShareKruger says he was ‘very disappointed’ by Boris Johnson’s record in government after Brexit
Q: Danny Kruger was political secretary to Boris Johnnson. But Reform UK is blaming him for letting immigration get out of control.
Kruger says he was political secretary to Johnson before the 2019 election. He is “enormously proud” of what Johnson did in terms of getting Brexit done.
He goes on:
I was very disappointed with what followed, firstly, with the failure to properly grip the system of Whitehall itself, which Brexit was only a prelude to. We needed to restore the government to the people. That was what people voted for in 2019 and I think we’ve failed to do that, particularly during Covid.
And then secondly, most obviously, with the wave of immigration that the government oversaw.
And while, as a Conservative MP in a sense, I bear some responsibility for that, in practice, I was arguing strongly against the degree of both legal and illegal migration that the government was presiding over.
Q: What do you think Musk meant when he talked about overthrowing the government?
Farage says Musk has been “chucking abuse at me now for six months”. He says journalists want him to hit back, because that would make a good headline. He is not going to do that, he says.
I’m not going to abuse Musk or Tommy Robinson or anything. We’re going to get on with building what we’re trying to build.
Q: As an Old Etonian, can you really understand the experience of ordinary people?
Kruger describes that as a “cheap shot”.
And he points out that for 10 years he has run a charity working with ex-offenders.
Updated at 06.34 EDT
Q: Danny, you say Britain is not broken. Do you realise Farage says it is?
Farage says Kruger is “more bullish” than he is.
ShareFarage says vast majority of people attending Tommy Robinson rally in London were ‘good, ordinary, decent people’
Nigel Farage and Danny Kruger now now taking questions.
Q: Do you expect more Tories to defect?
Kruger says the Tory party is not dead. It is just over as the main opposition. He says he does not think it will ever recover.
He says he would like to see other Tories follow him.
Farage says he keeps things under wraps. No one knew Kruger was defecting today.
He says the Tories have “zero chance” of winning the next election?
Q: What is your response to the Elon Musk?
Farage says:
As for Saturday, I think the vast majority of people that turned up were good, ordinary, decent people who are very, very concerned about what’s happening in this country,
I’ve noticed that the wave of flags that was that started about three weeks ago, going up around the country, far from subsiding, from what I can see this weekend, is accelerating massively.
There is, and it is a collective two fingers up to a British establishment that they feel utterly betrayed by in every single way.
As for the Musk comments, Farage says that Musk is generally rude about him.
He says it would be good to have some explanation from Musk as to what he meant by “fight”. He goes on:
We are radical, but we’re not revolutionaries.
If the fight that Musk was talking about was about standing up for our rights of free speech, if it was about fighting in elections to overcome the established parties, then that absolutely is the fight that we’re in.
And the reason you asked the question, I think the context of the way the word was used left a degree of ambiguity.
Updated at 06.31 EDT
Kruger says Tories were ‘failure’ in office, they are finished as national party, but conservatism ‘isn’t over’
In his speech at the Reform UK press conference, Danny Kruger said that he was leaving the Conservative party because he had concluded it was over as a party. But conservatism wasn’t over, he said.
He said:
I have been variously a member, an activist, an employee of the Conservative party for over 20 years, and I have many friends in the party, many good and decent people, which is why it is so personally painful for me to be doing what I am doing today.
There have been moments when I have been very proud to belong to the Tory party. In 2010 I was inspired by the Big Society, by schools reform and welfare reform. I was thrilled by Brexit and by what Boris Johnson pulled off in 2019 but those were exceptions to the rule.
The rule of our time in office was failure, bigger government, social decline, low wages, high taxes and less of what ordinary people actually wanted.
And now our country is entering the most profound set of crises in my lifetime, under a government even worse, far worse, than the one it replaced.
Crisis in the economy, crisis at the border, crisis in our streets, crisis in our military, crisis for young people. Yes, we are still a great country, and there are good reasons that so many migrants want to come here, but there are also reasons so many entrepreneurs and young people want to leave. Britain is not broken, but it is badly damaged. And so, in this crisis, something has got to give.
I hoped, after our defeat last year, that the Conservative party would learn the obvious lesson that the old ways don’t work, that centrism is not enough, that real change is needed.
But now we have had a year of stasis and drift and the sham unity that comes from not doing anything bold or difficult or controversial, and the result is [clear] in the polls, and those lost voters are not coming back. And every day, more and more people are joining them in deserting the party that has failed.
And so this is my tragic conclusion. The Conservative party is over, over as a national party, over as the principal opposition to the left.
But I am not despondent, because conservatism is not over. It’s never been needed more and actually never been more vibrant because the failure of the Conservative party has created space for an alternative.
The flame is passing from one torch to another … The new torch is already alight, already brighter than the one it is replacing, held aloft in firm and confident hands.
Updated at 06.26 EDT