Danny Kruger’s defection is seismic

Today’s defection bombshell has landed like a grenade in the Tory bunker: Danny Kruger, the communitarian Conservative MP for East Wiltshire, has joined Reform UK. Announcing his move at a Westminster presser flanked by Nigel Farage, Kruger didn’t mince his words: ‘The Conservatives are over.’

It’s a seismic event, the first sitting Tory MP to bolt to Reform this parliament. Farage, Westminster’s consummate showman, hailed it as ‘the beginning of the end’ for Kemi Badenoch’s flailing opposition.

Beyond the headlines, this isn’t just a body blow to the Conservatives – it’s also a coup for Reform that eclipses even the hallowed 2014 defection of Douglas Carswell to UKIP. Why? Because Carswell was a libertarian outlier feeding a single-issue insurgency, while Kruger is a Tory insider whose apostasy not only undermines the Conservatives, it also bolsters Reform’s credentials as a broad church and government-in-waiting.

In August 2014, Carswell stunned Westminster by defecting to UKIP. He duly won the by-election this triggered in his seat of Clacton by more than 12,000 votes. It was UKIP’s first parliamentary foothold, a propaganda triumph for Farage’s rag-tag army. As UKIP’s sole MP until 2017 (when he quit to go independent), Carswell embodied the party’s anti-system vibe, pro-market deregulation, anti-austerity rhetoric (if not always in deed) and a fierce belief in voter sovereignty over Westminster’s ‘elected dictatorship’.

Yet Carswell was never anything more than a peripheral backbencher in the Conservatives. He joined UKIP not as a Tory lynchpin, but as a fringe agitator gunning for a single cause: Brexit. UKIP, at its 2014 peak, was less a party than a battering ram, a pressure group hammering one anti-EU nail. With 24 seats – more than Labour and the Conservatives – in the European Parliament elections that year, it forced Cameron to fulfil his pledge to hold a referendum. But UKIP’s platform was otherwise wafer-thin: out of Europe and… well, that was the gig. Carswell’s defection validated UKIP’s protest potential, but didn’t transform UKIP into a governing force.

Contrast that with Kruger. His defection arrives amid Reform’s inexorable rise, polling up to 35 per cent, and lands like a precision strike on the Tory soul. Elected in 2019 in Devizes (before it became East Wiltshire), Kruger isn’t some eccentric loner. He was appointed shadow work and pensions secretary under Kemi Badenoch and spearheaded the party’s opposition to assisted dying. Prior to entering parliament he was David Cameron’s speechwriter and Boris Johnson’s political secretary.

Kruger’s views, long simmering, align uncannily with Reform’s principles, evidenced in his November 2023 Telegraph article, ‘Rishi Sunak must change course, or lose the election’. There, he warned the Conservative Party that it was ‘heading for a catastrophic defeat’ unless it honoured its 2019 manifesto pledges to Red Wall voters by curbing immigration and prioritising national identity over globalist drift. These aren’t recent conversions, they’re the threads that led him to Farage’s door.

Kruger’s centrality to the Tories is what elevates today’s defection. Under Badenoch, he has shaped opposition welfare policy. He has formed a vision of holistic conservatism, involving tax incentives for families and a safety net that prioritises responsibility over dependency. This aligns seamlessly with Reform’s 2024 manifesto, along with ceasing non-essential immigration, scrapping inheritance tax for family farms and prioritising British values in schools. Where Carswell decried EU overreach in abstract terms, Kruger possesses a more instinctive appreciation of Reform’s principles.

UKIP was a vehicle for Brexit, while Reform has every intention of being the next government. That’s the crux. Carswell joined a party polling at 13 per cent in 2015, and whose manifesto was little more than a Eurosceptic pamphlet. It was vague on economics beyond ‘cut red tape’ and silent on social and national renewal. Reform, by contrast, is the people’s phoenix: 677 council seats in May 2025, four MPs (now five), and a platform spanning economic and NHS reform.

Reactions from across the spectrum further underscore the magnitude. Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani describes Kruger as a ‘smart, and an original thinker… reasonable to presume others looking to join’. This nod to Kruger’s heft implies even adversaries recognise the defection’s ripple potential.

The implications will be far-reaching. For Badenoch, already reeling from a 17 per cent poll rating in May, this is fratricide. Her shadow team has been gutted and her ‘unite the right’ pitch is in tatters. Kruger’s exit also exposes a deeper Tory schism: free-market purists vs communitarian patriots, with the latter eyeing Reform’s tent. For Farage, this is rocket fuel. Reform gains not just a vote in the lobbies, but also intellectual gravitas, a bridge to floating Tories who see Badenoch’s crew as Sunak-lite. Kruger’s rural credibility bolsters Reform’s West Country push, where we have flipped council wards from blue to teal.

In the end, Carswell’s defection was a spark in the Brexit tinderbox – vital, but fleeting. Kruger’s is a flare in the gathering storm, illuminating Reform’s path to No10. As Kruger put it today: Reform is where the future of conservatism lies.

Gawain Towler is a commentator and an elected board member of Reform UK.