from Church Times
The Reform UK MP who is charged with getting ready for government talks to Matthew d’Ancona
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.”