David Gauke: Kruger’s defection doesn’t point the Conservatives towards disaster but to a crucial decision

David Gauke is a former Justice Secretary and was an independent candidate in South-West Hertfordshire at the 2019 general election.

The defection of Danny Kruger to Reform is significant.

It is significant because he is a sitting MP, and the first to defect directly to Reform – or one of its predecessor parties – since Mark Reckless in 2014. (It would be a surprise if we have to wait long for the next one; there is obviously a big name that is going to be revealed on the eve of the Conservative Party conference.)

It is also significant because Kruger is a more substantial figure than many of those who have already defected.  Many of them before could be dismissed as lightweights, but that would be an unfair description of Kruger.

That is not to say that he is not an idiosyncratic figure.

Kruger is a proper reactionary – suspicious of the Enlightenment and trendy talk of the liberties of the individual.  For him, society took a wrong turn centuries ago and should return to the natural, God-given order of things where the focus is upon family, community and the nation.  It is a worldview shaped by both romanticism and religiosity.  It is not necessarily well suited to delivering workable and effective policies, but it is one which he is capable of articulating with both intelligence and charm.

Nor is Kruger a down-the-line right winger.

He has a long and distinguished history as a campaigner for prison reform and was one of the first to point out that the Republicans in Texas were making efforts to reduce their prison population and prioritise rehabilitation.  But he has also had a keen sense of who his allies are.

His belief in the nation meant he believed in Brexit which meant that he believed in Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings with an intensity and loyalty that few matched (he was one of the few who defended Cummings over the Barnard Castle excursion).  Under Sunak, Kruger – a cerebral old-Etonian representing a safe southern seat – found himself part of a group devoted to reducing the high levels of immigration ushered in by Johnson, the New Conservatives, made up of largely working-class Tory MPs representing Red Wall constituencies.

One of the other high profile New Conservatives was Lee Anderson, and he and Kruger (an odd couple, if ever there was one) are now reunited as Reform colleagues.

Anderson is more typical of the Reform membership, but Kruger presumably feels comfortable enough in his new party.  It is a party that lauded Lucy Connally (one can question whether her sentence was unduly harsh, but her offending tweet disqualifies her from being any kind of hero) and one wonders how many Reform members and voters were happy to march with Tommy Robinson, but perhaps Kruger’s defection is a sign that the most thuggish elements of the far-right will be kept out of the party.

What Kruger’s defection tells us most about, however, is the Conservative Party.

His explanation for his move is a simple one – the Conservative Party has lost a large part of its support to Reform and it is not coming back.  For those most concerned about immigration, in particular, Kruger believes that the Conservatives let them down and will not be forgiven.  Those who believe in Kruger’s version of conservatism, he argues, should fall in behind Nigel Farage.

He has a point.  Go back to 2019 and Johnson’s General Election victory, politics appeared to be realigning. Working-class leave voters switched to the Tories to get Brexit done and defeat a Labour leader who they considered (reasonably enough) to be unpatriotic.  A new Conservative coalition of support was created, more patriotic, more working-class, represented across the nation (apart from those rather suspicious metropolitan areas occupied by the liberal elite).  Kruger must have had such high hopes.

For whatever reason, what followed was a disaster.  Those new Tory voters eventually felt betrayed and, by 2024, had somewhere else to go in the shape of Reform.  They had been promised that Brexit would be a triumph, immigration would fall, public services would be improved, and taxes kept down.  These promises were not met, and now here was a charismatic figure in Farage willing to repeat these promises uncontaminated by past failure.

It is no coincidence that many of the Tory defectors to Reform were close to Johnson.  As was apparent at the time, he effectively created a new party in 2019 with a new voter base and a new set of political priorities.  The result was a government that was incoherent and incompetent, but it was – briefly – an electoral force.  Now there is an opportunity to repeat the experiment.

How should the Conservatives respond to Kruger’s defection?

There will be plenty within the party who will say that it just has to try harder to appeal to right wing voters.  Reform is a one man band, and Farage could fall under a bus.  The party lacks experience, and will soon be exposed.  Perhaps a new Tory leader – energetic, good with social media, willing to take a few more policy risks, first name ‘Robert’ – will do the trick.

In any event, it will be said, the Tories cannot afford many more defections to Reform.  (Fanciful though this is, if 48 Conservative MPs switch to Reform, the Liberal Democrats become the official opposition.  If 68, Reform becomes the official opposition and the Conservatives would become the fourth largest party in the Commons.)

There is a very good chance that the Conservatives will continue to chase after the Reform voters.  But Kruger is right to argue that it is a strategy that is doomed to fail.  If what you want is party of the populist right in Government, built on the support of socially authoritarian voters, we have reached the point when – to use Kruger’s metaphor – the torch has passed to Farage.  With every further defection, that point is underlined.

There is an alternative strategy.

Rather than settling for being the country’s second most popular party of the populist right, try being unambiguously a party of the centre right.  Pro-market and pro-growth; fiscally conservative; internationally engaged; problem-solving and pragmatic.  None of this might sound terribly fashionable, but there is a gap in the electoral market that is only going to grow.  Reform will spend money like “drunken sailors” (as Kruger once put it), Labour looks set to drift leftwards, and the Liberal Democrats remain in their comfort zone as a protest party of the centre left.

In serious times, when the public finances need fixing and the economy needs to be made more competitive, the country needs a serious party of the centre right.

Electorally, it requires a focus not exclusively on the 2019 Tory voters who have abandoned the Conservatives but the lost Tory voters from 2015 and 2017.  It means a full-throated condemnation of the worst aspects of the Johnson and Truss administrations, and – at the very least – an acknowledgement that Brexit has damaged our economy and that the damage should be mitigated.  Rather than imitating Reform, the Conservative Party should differentiate itself from the populists.

The real significance of Kruger’s defection is that it signals that the battle to be the principal party of the populist right is over.  The Conservative Party must reconcile itself to this reality and reinvent itself as, once again, a party of the centre right.