OF THE five sitting Conservative MPs to have defected to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, much the most significant is Danny Kruger. True, the 51-year-old MP for East Wiltshire is not a former Home Secretary, like Suella Braverman. Nor did he ever run for the Conservative leadership — although he was campaign manager for Robert Jenrick, who lost to Kemi Badenoch in November 2024, and joined him on the Reform bench in January.
What sets Mr Kruger apart in Mr Farage’s team is the daunting scale of the policy task that he has been set — to prepare a party that had only one MP before the last General Election for government after the next — and, closely related to this, the depth and originality of his thinking.
Over tea at the House of Commons, Mr Kruger is a genial, intellectually engaging presence, with a shock of grey hair and a style that I would characterise as “heritage-conscious modernity”. As he says more than once, he is not the reactionary of caricature. His ideas, deeply rooted in his Christianity, are “timeless” rather than narrowly “old-fashioned”.
The mission, as he sees it, is not theocratic, but, in the best sense of both words, progressive and radical: to embrace the opportunities offered by technology, to modernise communities hollowed out by deindustrialisation, to transform the prospects of the young and old alike, and to protect the environment, by pursuing these objectives within a framework defined by values of Christian origin.
“I’m actually very enthused by what the modern world is and is becoming,” he says. “I wish I could draw this out more and better into retail terms, because I know that my politics is seen as backward-looking. I wish I could successfully convey the sense that technology, modernity, could deliver us a life in which parents play with their children, people work close to home. You know your neighbours, you live sustainably, and source your food locally.”
Although it was his unexpected defection in September which hit the headlines, the speech on Christianity and politics that he delivered in an almost empty Commons chamber last July may prove more consequential; it has been viewed online more than three million times.
“Our democracy is founded on Christian faith,” he said. “England is the oldest Christian country and the prototype of nations across the West.”
But the speech was not a history lesson: its focus was pointedly contemporary. “In the space of three days in one infamous week, this House authorised the killing of unborn children — of nine-month-old babies — and it passed a Bill to allow the killing of the elderly and disabled,” he said. “It was a great sin. If I, standing here, have any power to repent on behalf of this House, I hereby repent of what we did.”
Wherever you stand on assisted dying or abortion, it is hard to exaggerate how countercultural this moment was. When I interviewed Tony Blair about the connection between his faith and his politics 30 years ago, the ensuing storm was extraordinary. It led to his media team’s famous rule: “We don’t do God.”
Yet, in October 2024, Shabana Mahmood, then the Justice Secretary, felt able to declare that she opposed assisted dying because, “as a Muslim, I have an unshakeable belief in the sanctity and the value of human life.” The connection between faith and politics is nothing new. What is new is the readiness of at least some politicians to talk about it so openly.
“There definitely has been a shift, a positive shift recently,” Mr Kruger says.
This much is certain: if I had been interviewing an ambitious and cerebral politician of the Right 20 years ago, all the philosophical allusions would have been to Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, or Joseph Schumpeter.
For Mr Kruger, the reference points are very different: Alasdair MacIntyre, Roger Scruton, Paul Kingsnorth, Iain McGilchrist, Charles Taylor, Carl Trueman. He is an emphatically post-secular conservative.
In this respect, his 2023 book Covenant — set to be reissued later this year — is one of the most important written by a politician in many years, a reframing of the challenges of the public sphere as a quest, in a pluralist country of Christian heritage, to rebuild strong social, spiritual, and local relationships.
To give a sense of its sheer distinctiveness: Mr Kruger takes issue with transgender ideology as a new variant on the ancient “gnostic heresy” according to which (he writes) “the material order is inherently evil and goodness only exists in the spiritual or psychic realm.”
AlamyNigel Farage with Danny Kruger at a press conference to announce his defection to Reform UK in September 2025
Not that his upbringing was religious: his father, the late writer and businessman Rayne Kruger, was not a believer, and neither is his mother, the celebrity chef Dame Prue Leith (with whom he disagrees profoundly but amicably on assisted dying).
A father of three, he attributes his conversion in his twenties to the prayers of his future wife, Emma, and to C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (1952). “Between starting and ending it, I sort of switched my identity. And I don’t know what it was but suspect reading it was — correlation and causation — an act of submission, just to open the book. And I kind of gave in,” he tells me.
Today, he identifies two serious challenges to Christianity. The first is a mash-up of “wokery” and paganism: “It feels to me like a direct reflection of the Fall, and subsequent falls that happened — the Tower of Babel, all the rest of it. It feels like a very clear echo of all of the mistakes and heresies that we read about in the Bible. . . It seems to me to be very hostile to what I believe in, what the Christian Western tradition believes in, which is civil society, organic association, obligations to others, belonging.” The rejection of all norms leads only to chaos, he says: “It’s only when you have normativity that you can have genuine diversity.”
The second peril that he identifies is a specific form of Islam — and he is at pains to emphasise that a great many Muslims, such as his friend the Labour MP Naz Shah, make a huge contribution to British society. Even so, he says: “I am bothered by the growth of the numbers of an essentially foreign culture which now occupy large numbers of our towns or cities. And I’m concerned by the radicalisation. . . It strikes me as difficult to be a very strict orthodox Muslim and to conform to the expectations of British citizenship.”
In the fierce argument over nationhood and citizenship, Mr Kruger firmly rejects ethno-nationalism. “There are people who are living here currently who should leave, not just illegal immigrants, but people who are basically just coasting, because we’ve invited them all, their relatives, and they’re essentially living here as passengers, as stowaways. . . But I disagree with the ethno-nationalists about the mass compulsory remigration of people in settled communities. They have every right to be here.”
How does he reconcile the moral compass of his faith with the conduct of some of his colleagues? This question led to a sharp exchange in May with Emma Barnett on the BBC’s Today programme over ugly misogynistic social-media posts by Robert Kenyon, Reform’s candidate in the Makerfield by-election.
“All these things are important in terms of their symbolism, and certainly character matters in public life,” he says. “But it’s a fundamentally second-order issue. It’s a distraction from the main debate. This constant attention on what some candidate said years ago is just a big way of diverting attention.” He adds: “I hope you will never see my WhatsApps, you know?”
There have been whispers around Westminster that Mr Kruger is unhappy about the undeclared £5-million donation made to Mr Farage, before he was an MP, by the crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne, which is now under investigation by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner. But, in person, Mr Kruger remains effusive about the Reform leader.
“There is a great rebellion under way. Nigel has accurately identified himself with the rebellion. And I think democracy is doing its job. It’s producing a challenger.”
Was the Reform leader right to call for “pure cold rage” in reaction to Henry Nowak’s murder and the response of the police? “I think he was totally right. He was just articulating what the public thinks,” Mr Kruger says. He rejects the charge that Mr Farage’s language was, in effect, an incitement to the disorder that followed in Southampton. “It’s a further example of this view of the ordinary people in this country as being basically led by the nose by politicians.”
The key, Mr Kruger thinks, is Mr Farage’s paradoxical capacity to deliver a difficult message with a grin. “Nigel is uniquely good at saying two apparently opposite things. One is: ‘Isn’t everything terrible?’ And the other is: ‘Isn’t everything marvellous?’ He’s having a great time, and looks like he is.”
There is a long way to go for Reform UK, as Mr Kruger is well aware. But, for all the volatility, political turbulence, and tribalism, he is carried forward by the certainty that “We’ve tested to destruction the idea that we can all get along happily in a godless world.”
And then he is off to Lambeth Palace, for dinner with the Archbishop of Canterbury.