Conservative MP Danny Kruger has become the first sitting Conservative MP to defect to Reform UK.
Kruger has been an MP since 2019, and sat on Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s team as a shadow work and pensions minister.
“The Conservatives are over,” he told a press conference, sitting alongside Reform party leader Nigel Farage.
Kruger said he had been “honoured” to be asked to help Reform prepare for government, and said he hoped that Farage would be the next prime minister.
The East Wiltshire MP – who has said he would not be triggering a by-election – said the Conservatives were no longer the main party of opposition.
He said: “There have been moments when I have been very proud to belong to the Tory party”, but added: “The rule of our time in office was failure.
“Bigger government, social decline, lower wages, higher taxes and less of what ordinary people actually wanted.”
He added: “This is my tragic conclusion, the Conservative Party is over, over as a national party, over as the principal opposition to the left.”
Although he said he had “great regard” for Badenoch, he said the Tory party had a “toxic brand”, adding: “We have had a year of stasis and drift and the sham unity that comes from not doing anything bold or difficult or controversial.”
Describing his move leaving a party he has been a member of for 20 years as “personally painful”, he said his “mission” with Reform would be to “not just to overthrow the current system, it is to restore the system we need”.
Responding to the news of the defection, Badenoch said: “Danny has made his case very clear, that this is not about me.
“I can’t be distracted by that, and I’m not going to get blown off course by these sort of incidents.
“I know this is the sort of thing that is going to happen while a party is changing. I’m making sure people understand what Conservative values are.”
Kruger’s defection is damaging for Badenoch, not only as a Tory thinker and veteran, but also as the most significant among several from the party moving to Reform.
Speaking after the press conference, Kruger told the BBC he had come to the conclusion the Conservative Party remains “the same party that failed the people in the last government” and doesn’t have “any chance” of winning the next election.
A few weeks ago, Kruger said he agreed with Reform on many issues except public spending, telling MPs in July: “There is a problem: they would spend money like drunken sailors.”
Asked about his comment, Kruger said: “I think we’re all sober sailors now, I’m glad to say, because since I said that Reform have corrected their position on welfare spending.
“I was very concerned that we need to really reduce overall benefit spending… Nigel made clear he also wants to bring down overall benefit spending but he does want to support families with children.”
Kruger is the second sitting MP to join Reform UK. Lee Anderson, who was previously a Tory MP, sat as an independent before joining Reform in 2024.
Reform now have five MPs in the Commons, having seen two of their MPs elected in the 2024 general election, Rupert Lowe and James McMurdock, leave the party.
His previous jobs include serving as former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s speechwriter, penning the “hug a hoodie” speech, and as former political secretary to Boris Johnson when he was prime minister.
Kruger spoke in a 2022 Parliamentary debate about the US’s abortion ban and told MPs he disagreed that pregnant women had an “absolute right to bodily autonomy” and that he didn’t understand why the UK was “lecturing” the US.
In 2023, Kruger was one of the speakers at a National Conservatism Conference, an event organised by a right-wing think tank from the United States, and made comments about the role of conventional family values in society.
The evangelical Christian told delegates that marriages between men and women were “the only possible basis for a safe and successful society” and one that “wider society should recognise and reward”.
Rishi Sunak, the Conservative prime minister at the time, distanced himself from the remarks.
Kruger is the son of TV chef Prue Leith and an Old Etonian, who studied at Edinburgh and Oxford Universities before becoming a director at the Centre for Policy Studies.
A Labour Party spokesperson said: “Nigel Farage can recruit as many failed Tories as he likes – it won’t change the fact that he has no plan for Britain.
“Britain deserves better than Reform’s Tory tribute act that would leave working people paying a very high price.”
Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper labelled the Conservative Party “a shell of its former self” and said Badenoch had pushed lifelong Tories towards her party “in their droves”.
“Nigel Farage’s party is shapeshifting into the Conservatives in front of our very eyes,” she said.
“It is getting to the point where the only difference between them is just a slightly lighter shade of blue.”