Daniel Hannan: Defections are distractions that cloud a much starker choice for the parties of the Right

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020 and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.

“When you’ve shouted ‘Rule Britannia’,

When you’ve sung ‘God Save the Queen’,

When you’ve finished killing Kruger with your mouth…”

Defections bring out the worst in politicos.

They make us tribal, bellicose and inconsistent. I wrote here more than a decade ago about how bizarre it is to turn against someone who believes all the same things as the day before, and whose character is unchanged, simply because of a differently coloured rosette.

There are, of course, good and bad defections. Some are principled, some careerist. But being a tribal species, we instead tend to define as “good” the defectors who join us and “bad” those who leave.

Reform is almost certainly storing up at least one more high-profile defection to announce at the start of the Tory conference. There are bound to be Tories who have calculated that they would rather catch the rising tide.

In Danny Kruger’s case, though, it is hard to infer a careerist motive.

His Wiltshire constituency – where I campaigned for him in 2019 – is one of the few that, even now, the Tories might realistically hold. (I suspect this is why he did not follow the Carswell Convention and offer local people an immediate by-election. A pity, as that precedent has now been definitively abandoned.)

He will have known that the switch would cost him friendships; but he could no longer in conscience stay where he was. I think this is a pity. He always struck me as naturally at home in the party of, if not Thatcher, certainly Clarendon and Bolingbroke. It will feel his loss.

What impact will Danny have on his new party? Will he be given his head, allowed to inject seriousness into a policy programme that has, until now, been largely declamatory? Or will he go the way of previous high-profile Reform supporters who attracted too much publicity?

Nigel Farage is acutely aware of the accusation that he won’t share the limelight.

He knows that potential defectors are held back by the thought that they will have no future in a one-man band. And, in all the time I have known him – we represented the same patch as MEPs for 21 years, arriving on the same day and leaving on the same day – I don’t think I have ever known him take any interest in any of his manifestoes. On paper, then, they should be compatible, Nigel doing the campaigning and Danny doing the policy.

Still, I was struck by how Zia Yusuf, the former Reform chairman, welcomed Danny’s defection on X. “He will be the Head of a new Preparing for Government unit, reporting directly to me as Head of Policy….” Really? Danny has left his party after 30 years just to feed ideas in to someone else?

And what are those ideas? Well, this brings me back to the paradox of the contemporary Right. Despite all the sound and fury, the Tories and Reform are remarkably close on policy. How many Conservatives will disagree with Danny’s summary of his policy prescriptions?

“We need to get out of the international legal entanglements that tie the hands of government, particularly when it comes to deporting illegal migrants. We need large-scale reindustrialisation and an end to the madness of net zero. We need tax cuts that both boost growth and, through the paradoxical miracle of the market economy, grow tax receipts. And we need change not just in policy but in the actual machinery of government, to restore the powers of ministers over civil servants and the accountability of ministers to Parliament.”

That, or something very like it, will doubtless be the offer of both Rightist parties at the next election, and would have been Kruger or no Kruger.

Or is it something else?

Does Danny see a chance to infuse a party with his evangelical faith? Something similar happened in the US, with religious groups latching on to the unlikely figure of Donald Trump. Perhaps he sees Reform as the way to pursue his agenda of re-enchanting our institutions, re-establishing moral absolutes in the public space and being explicit about the Christian foundations of the British constitution – though it is hard to see Nigel, who calls himself a “lapsed Anglican”, a truly delicious concept – buying all this.

I take Danny at his word when he says that a big part of his calculation was simply that he wants a Right-of-Centre government and can see Reform winning more easily than the Tories. Fair enough: we can all read the opinion polls. But if Reform is going to do all the big things he wants, it will need a mandate, not just a majority. It won’t want to find itself in the same position as the current Labour government, elected on just 34 per cent of the vote. And, to ensure that it gets a mandate, it will want to focus on the seats that it can realistically win (which probably don’t include East Wilts).

No, cut it any way you like, we keep coming back to what the electoral logic dictates, however much the two parties chafe at it. Under first-past-the-post, it would be calamitous to have competing Rightist candidates in every constituency. One way or another, there needs to be a pact.

My guess is that Danny, clever as well as conscientious, understands this.

No one likes it. But it is going to have to happen.