Miriam Cates: Kruger poses the Conservative Party a hard question – is it too broad a church?

Miriam Cates is the former MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge.

The defection of Danny Kruger to Reform UK is a major blow to the Conservatives. If the Party was a football team, it would have just lost one of its best players. Kruger is a highly respected intellectual within the British conservative movement – and unlike former parliamentarians like Andrea Jenkyns, Jake Berry, and Nadine Dorries who have also jumped ship, a sitting MP to boot.

In the last Parliament, I had the privilege of working closely with Danny as we endeavoured to shift the Tory Party in a more conservative direction on issues such as immigration, family and culture. Together we set up the New Conservatives, a group of mainly ‘Red Wall’ MPs concerned that our party was failing to deliver on the promises made to the electorate by Boris Johnson in 2019. We believed that the Conservative Party should move away from the kind of globalism and liberalism that have disenfranchised so many voters and return to a politics of family, place and nation.

Despite having no formal role within the Party since 2022 (we rebels were confined to the backbenches), Danny’s intelligence, integrity and impressive organisational skills persuaded dozens of Conservative MPs to join our cause and ultimately to defy the whip over the Safety of Rwanda Bill, supporting amendments that would – if accepted by the Government – have prevented human rights claims against deportations and solved the small boats crisis.

Where Kruger leads, others follow and his departure will have sent shockwaves through CCHQ. But it’s not just other MPs who may now be tempted to follow in his wake. At the Reform conference earlier this month (where I was speaking at an event hosted by the Centre for Social Justice) I was approached again and again by people who confessed they were still Conservative Party members but considering making the leap to Reform.

What was holding them back was uncertainty about where Farage’s Party stood on key social issues. For many ‘small-c’ conservatives, the defection of  Kruger – a politician whose deeply-held conservative beliefs are consistent and well documented – will put those fears to bed. In recruiting Kruger to the Reform leadership, Nigel Farage has sent a clear signal about the direction in which he wants to take his Party.

Explaining his decision at a Reform press conference in central London on Monday, Kruger told the gathered media that he believes the Conservative Party is a spent force and that Reform is now the only viable opposition to the Left. But is Reform’s newest MP correct in this pessimistic assessment of his former Party’s prospects?

Since the general election in July 2024, the Conservative Party has fallen in the polls from its lowest ever vote share of 24 per cent% to an almost subterranean 18 per cent. On current projections, the Conservatives could end up with fewer than 50 seats in the next parliament.

Four years is a long time in politics. But this Labour government could not have made a worse start to its term in office, and yet the Conservatives have completely failed to capitalise on Starmer’s woes, with the majority of disgruntled Labour supporters headed straight for Reform. It seems almost impossible to imagine that the Conservative Party can return to government in 2029.

Psephologically, then, Kruger could be justified in declaring that the Conservative Party is finished. But what about philosophically? Is he right that the Conservative Party no longer carries the conservative ‘torch’?

Judging by the performance of the last government, Kruger has a point. Small boat crossings and casual approach to mass migration proved electorally fatal for the Conservative Party. Unsurprisingly, conservative voters wanted strong borders and limited demographic change. When the “Boriswave” brought two million new immigrants in just three years, the visible and potentially permanent change to our country drove voters away from the Conservatives in droves.

On economic policy, quantitative easing led to a massive expansion of the public debt and a spike in inflation; hardly the fiscal discipline that Conservative voters demanded. And commitments to expensive green policies saw electricity bills soar whilst energy security fell. Even farmers, formerly the Tories’ core vote, bemoaned the Government’s preference for rewilding over food production.

On social policy, the Conservative Party moved even further away from its conservative core. The last parliament imposed an extreme abortion regime on Northern Ireland against local wishes because the UN demanded it. The Johnson government introduced “no fault divorce”, thus making a marriage easier to get out of than a mobile phone contract. The Tories failed to prevent trans ideology taking root in schools, universities, and even the NHS.

Conservatives believe that the family is the building block of society and the vehicle through which our culture, history and values are passed from one generation to the next. Yet instead of supporting families, the last government oversaw economic and social conditions that made it harder and harder for families to form and endure.

In the budget of March 2023, Jeremy Hunt announced that the taxpayer would fund 30 hours of institutional childcare each week for babies of just nine-months old, to encourage mothers back into the workplace. This plan was economically illiterate: with the government buying 80 per cent of available places at a fixed price, it is unsurprising that many nurseries have closed. But worse, this policy undermines the crucial bond between mother and baby that we know – from evidence, experience, and plain common sense – is essential for the healthy development of children.

All governments make mistakes. But these policy errors were the result not of incompetence but of a lack of conservative principles within the Party.

Amongst a significant number of Conservative MPs, a preference for international law over parliamentary sovereignty, superficial economic growth over family relationships, and debt over living within our means all contributed to a drift into the kind of uni-party liberalism so hated by conservative voters. The last government had a Conservative majority, but not a conservative one.

Of course these are criticisms of the last Conservative administration, not of the current parliamentary party. But though the Tories are much reduced in number on the green benches, many fear that the Party remains so broad a church that it has no creed. As Kruger pointed out, the unity currently displayed by the party is superficial; when few clear policies and no manifesto, there is little over which to disagree.

But when and if the Conservatives announce the kinds of commitments that are so desperately needed – pulling out of the ECHR, mass deportation of illegal immigrants, means testing the state pension, supporting families in the tax system, repealing assisted suicide, ending abortion to birth – I sadly doubt that unity can hold. As Kruger has said, Badenoch is brave and determined, but she cannot achieve the impossible. Too many Conservative MPs would baulk at such an agenda.

Can the Conservative Party regain its conservative heart? This should be the single most important question on the minds of Conservative members right now. Yet some in the party seem preoccupied with denouncing Kruger as ‘disloyal’, displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of what political parties are for.

The Conservative Party is often described as a family. It has certainly been responsible for forging deep and lifelong friendships and a sense of shared purpose. But the purpose of a family is to provide for and keep its members safe at all times, to publicly defend each other, even when they’re wrong. Family relationships are given, not chosen, and they are life-long, whether we like it or not.

Political parties should not operate like families. A political party does not exist for its members’ comfort and security, but to serve the country. Membership of a political party is chosen not inherited, and loyalty to that party depends on continuing political agreement rather than an unquestioning sense of duty. Of course members should treat each other with honour and respect, but genuine political disagreements are not a betrayal – especially when they are in the national interest.

All conservatives agree that, for the good of our nation, this Labour government must be a one term administration. If the Conservative Party is no longer the best placed entity to defeat the Left and rebuild our nation then it is not ‘disloyal’ to consider the alternatives. No doubt there are some who have and will switch to Reform out of personal interest, but this charge cannot be levelled at Danny Kruger, whose East Wiltshire constituency is one of the safest Conservative seats in the country.

It is not an exaggeration to say that our nation is on the verge of irreversible decline. Our economic situation is perilous, with debt spiralling and no plan to grapple with unaffordable pension and welfare commitments. A growing sense of generational inequality combined with anger over immigration threatens to topple over from peaceful protest into something far more ugly.

In our first-past-the-post parliamentary democracy, ‘small-c’ conservatives need to coalesce around the political party that is best placed to ride the wave that is coming and, in Kruger’s terms, to lead a “restoration”, not a revolution. The Conservative Party is running out of time to prove that it can rise to that challenge.