Another PM Disconnect - How Sunak’s second reset of 2024 just made things markedly worse (Part . II)

Danny Kruger is not a particularly pleasant Conservative. 

In fact - 

The member for the beautiful market town of Devizes in Wiltshire - aside from possessing the notable distinction of being one of the few Conservative MPs more likely to retain his seat at the next election than many, many others - is on the marginal and extreme ‘right’ of Conservative Party policy. 

As a founding member of the entryist, so-called New Conservatives group, consisting of many MPs who, incidentally, are expected to lose their seats at the next election, Kruger has spent the last year or so providing numerous, functionally unworkable, divisive policies by the way of periodic, faux manifesto announcements aimed squarely at pushing the executive into having a more hardline - and what Kruger feels is a more traditional - Conservative agenda. 

This coming week it’s likely we will probably be seeing more of Kruger and his cohorts after they performatively throw barbs at the government for failing on its immigration policy.

One reason Kruger focuses on issues - such as immigration, for example, or scrutiny over net zero policy, low taxes, social conservatism, an obsession with having babies, culture wars and the so-called “war on woke” - is partly because he is seeking to emulate the extreme direction of the MAGA-remnants of the GOP in US politics; indeed, the New Conservatives share the same platform as many of the voices on the fringes of right-wing discourse, many emanating from the US and from within Washington think-tanks - funded by some fairly shady figures, (for what it’s worth, the register of interests for Lee Anderson is becoming very interesting).

The other reason -

Kruger believes that these marginal issues offer the panacea to the nations woes, and without a explicit and rigid focus on them, the Conservatives will lose an unprecedented number of seats at the next election - particularly to Reform UK, who's platform is virtually identical, though ironically for a populist party, not especially popular.

Kruger is obviously wrong on where the Conservatives should be placing their focus; the UK is more concerned about matters relating to the NHS, the cost-of-living and the economy instead than it is about culture wars. Even immigration tosses and turns in salience with environment policy yet as noted in my previous piece, the Conservatives have virtually reneged on the latter to the chagrin of moderate voters.

Yet Kruger remains, despite only being elected as an MP in 2019, as one of the central figures fighting for what those on the Right call a more purist [and ‘traditional’] vision of what the Conservative Party is ‘supposed’ to be. 

That said - 

In a rare moment that typifies this idea that even a stopped clock can be right twice a day, Kruger said something rather interesting. For a change.