Reform wheels out Danny Kruger, the ‘brains’ of Nigel Farage’s operation | John Crace

Nigel Farage too Marmite for you? Lee Anderson too Lee Andersony? Richard Tice too smooth? Sarah Pochin a bit too racisty? Don’t worry. These things happen. But all will be well, because Reform have just the MP for you. Someone who can be passed off as a safeish pair of hands. Someone who won’t frighten the horses. Too much. Step forward Danny Kruger. Just don’t look too close into his eyes. Not even Danny knows quite who Danny really is. Sometimes you have to judge a man by the company he keeps.

Kruger is the latest Reform recruit, having jumped ship from the Tories just over a month ago. Not necessarily a huge loss to Kemi Badenoch as Danny has proved time and again that his judgment is anything but infallible. But that hasn’t put him off. Because even when he’s wrong, Danny manages to convince himself that he’s right. Put simply, he’s not nearly as bright as he believes himself to be. Yet still somehow clever enough to convince Nige that he be admitted as one of the brains of the Reform operation.

Since transferring his affections to Farage, Kruger has been entrusted with getting Reform policy ready for the next election. There will be no sitting around and wondering what to do next if Farage finds himself in Downing Street, because Danny will have come up with a cunning plan. Put your trust in Danny. Largely because Reform have yet to find anyone better.

Somehow, Danny has convinced both himself and Nige that he knows what he’s doing. He is presented to the world as a man with experience of government. Only in reality he has none. All he has ever done is write a few speeches for David Cameron while in opposition and act as Boris Johnson’s political secretary for a couple of months in 2019. After that, nada. He has no more inside knowledge than the rest of us. What could possibly go wrong? Confused? You soon will be.

No matter. For their second press conference in as many days – there’s a third due tomorrow, strictly for the masochists – Reform let Kruger loose, closely policed by Zia Yusuf. Just in case Danny was to stray off piste. More than usual, at any rate. But this was basically the Danny K show. His chance to share with the world all of the exciting thoughts he had come up with in the past six weeks now that he was freed from the demands of being a Conservative.

He was feeling chipper, he began. Thrilled to be free. Reform was currently like an unruly pirate ship but give it a few years and it would be a fully functioning naval vessel. Or not. Nige has had years and years of running political parties, and they have never evolved much beyond a one-man band. But this time would be different. Reform promised to be the grownups. Serious times required serious politicians. The country was broken. And Danny should know. Because he had been a member of the party that broke it. Not that he was in the mood to apologise. Danny is very much old school. Everything is always someone else’s fault.

Now for the plan. Parliament would be sovereign. Apart from the bits that wouldn’t be sovereign. Because although Reform promised to have some top-notch, cabinet-ready candidates plucked from nowhere by the next election, at least half of ministers would be Nige’s personal appointments. Too much scrutiny is a dangerous thing. As Danny knows only too well. Because he has said he would never dream of giving his Wiltshire constituents a chance to express their feelings at his recent defection. To spare them the embarrassment of re-electing him in a landslide. Sometimes you have to wonder whether he thinks before he speaks. Or whether he just thinks we’re all too stupid to care. It’s possible the stupidity is closer to home.

But Kruger also had a big shake-up of the civil service in mind. It had grown 30% since Brexit. Er … yes. That’s because we no longer have EU bureaucrats to do the hard work and because there’s more admin to do. So if you want to know why the civil service is so large, Danny could look closer to home. To himself and Nige. Both architects of Brexit. The cheek is breathtaking.

There was more. Reform would discontinue the leases of five Whitehall departments. That would probably be the same five departments Labour had already promised to discontinue. The idiocy levels were rising still higher. Welcome to the return of the cones hotline. Danny would set up a secret phone line to which people could ring in with stories of government waste. Please press 1 to leave a message. Your call is not important to us and we will not get back to you.

Then the questions. Unsurprisingly, one of the first was about Sarah Pochin. Zia took this one, mainly because Danny had already spent 10 minutes making a fool of himself trying to explain it away on the Today programme. It is now the official Reform line to insist that Pochin is not “racist in her heart”. Just in her mouth and in her thoughts.

All she was guilty of was “accidental racism”. It’s a real problem for Sarah because it keeps happening to her. Only a few months ago she was insisting that Afghans and Eritreans were more likely to be sex offenders. Imagine her pain. Loving black and brown people so much that the sight of them drives you mad. Counting them. Always counting them.

Some also thought it was a bit of a cheek for Kruger to lecture us on good governance when so many Reform-led councils were a hopeless rabble. Zia insisted that in every well-run council there was a rabble waiting to be unleashed. So Reform were ahead of the game. But by now Danny was ready to go for it. Doubling down on everything.

We were about to enter a new era. In which everyone would do exactly as Nige said. We would no longer be bound by international law. We would be going it alone. Pariah status, here we come. The whole DEI agenda would be scrapped. There were far too many of the wrong people in top jobs. You get his drift. He wanted a God-fearing country where children were brought up by a mother and father. Danny is not a fan of LBGTQ+.

Finally we were done. More details would be revealed later. As and when he had them. The war on waste had begun. One day, Danny might even get round to taking a look at himself.

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