Profile:Danny Kruger, more Christian Nationalist than Traditional Conservative

Reform's new MP's links to Legatum, Peter Thiel, Paul Marshall, James Orr and JD Vance

Danny Kruger's defection from the Conservative Party to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has been described as a shock in much of the UK media. Outlets sympathetic to Reform have described the decision as a big deal, with Kruger described as a sensible and serious thinker. Reform's critics have described the move as Reform recycling Conservatives, however Kruger is less a Conservative and more a product of the think tanks that straddle the Atlantic.

Kruger's entrance into politics came via the opaquely funded Centre for Policy Studies and Legatum, a think tank founded by New Zealand born Christopher Chandler who made a considerable portion of his wealth through Gazprom the Russian energy company. Chandler, alongside billionaire Paul Marshall, owns GB News.

Legatum played an important role in Brexit, and was found in 2018 to have broken Charity Commission rules when it published an overtly political Brexit Report.

Kruger then went to work for Boris Johnson in 2019 for a few months before being parachuted into parliament with a safe seat.

Kruger's ideology is more closely aligned to the Christian Right in the US than the traditional Conservatives, he has appeared at NatCon and launched his own New Social Covenant initiative that closely resembled NatCon's Christian Nationalist statement of principles.

Is Kruger’s defection another sign that Reform will further the MAGAfication of British politics? Farage has also appeared at several NatCons and at an Alliance Defending Freedom event. It would be unsurprising if Reform start talking of family and tradition more often.

It seems entirely believable that Kruger’s defection was planned at a dinner held over the summer with JD Vance and James Or of Toby Young’s Free Speech Union.

Inside JD Vance’s meetings with British politicians on the Right

By Ben Riley-Smith of the Telegraph

George Osborne organised a drinks do for the US Vice Pres on Tuesday evening.

Around a dozen people were there including four sitting Tory MPs

- Laura Trott

- Robert Jenrick

- Chris Philp

- Katie Lam

All aged under 50. All broadly tipped for future Tory leadership positions.

Noticeable it was that generation of Tories invited rather than the grandees of past Conservative administrations.

Vance himself is only at the start of his political career (only became US senator in 2023)

90 minutes of chat at the Cotswold’s manor where he is staying. Ukraine, free speech, mass migration all discussed.

A source familiar with chat on Vance: “He was very down to earth. Nice and relaxed. Both interested and interesting.”

Also Paul Marshall, increasingly influential in Tory circles as the owner of GB News and Spectator, was there too.

On Monday, Vance had dinner with another Tory MP (Danny Kruger), academic Dr James Orr and ex-Apprentice contested Thomas Skinner.

On Wednesday, Nigel Farage had a one-on-one breakfast with Vance. 45mins.

Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, did not see Vance

James Orr

James Orr is a founding member of the Free Speech Union, which due to Orr's involvement gained the support of tech billionaire Peter Thiel in its creation. Orr is on the board of the Edmund Burke Foundation which organises the National Conservatism Conference which has explicit Christian Nationalist overtones and is also closely linked to Peter Thiel.

Orr is a close friend of JD Vance and also used to be an advisor to Danny Kruger during Boris Johnson’s time as Prime Minister.

From the Byline Times By Iain Overton

Today, Orr sits as the UK chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation; chairman of the advisory board of the pro-Reform think tank(s) Resolute 1850 / Centre for a Better Britain; on the advisory board of the Prosperity Institute (aka the Brexit-backing Dubai-based group Legatum); and on the board of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (it sets out to “re-lay the foundations of our civilisation”). He also managed to find time to organise the Now and England event in June, which had shadow minister Robert Jenrick and one-time Reform MP Rupert Lowe on the ticket.

He’s a man so busy that his list of publications includes a claimed 2022 book, Being and Eternity (Bloomsbury) that, three years on, seems yet to have gone to print. It might take some time.

But judging by what he has published and said, Orr’s views are clearly absolute. He opposes abortion at every stage of pregnancy, including in cases of rape. He thinks the US Capitol riot of January 2021 was exaggerated by the “global left”. He believes diversity weakens nations. He finds Britain’s armed forces compromised by inclusive recruitment adverts. He admires American gun laws.

He also sees secularism as hollowing out “the human world of meaning, significance (and) transcendence”. And Orr seeks certainty against this godless world. He’s a man, in his own words, who stands “committed to the objective existence of the lawful regularities that order the world”.

Billionaires

It seems like all roads lead back to billionaires.

JD Vance’s rapid rise through politics came through the backing of Peter Thiel who bankrolled his election campaigns. Vance's friend James Orr founded FSU with Thiel's support, and organises the NatCon conferences that Thiel has funded and spoken at. Kruger has also spoken at these events.

It should be noted that JD Vance also met with Paul Marshall, the British billionaire hedge fund manager and media baron who owns GB New and employs most of Reform’s MPs. Paul Marshall whose Alliance for Responsible for Citizenship (ARC) has Kruger and Orr as directors.

It would appear Vance, and Kruger are doing the work of the billionaire class on either side of the Atlantic with Orr effectively acting as an international organiser.

The organisations Kruger has been involved in are certainly more closely aligned to Christian Nationalism than traditional Conservatism.

New Conservatives

By Adam Barnett

Kruger leads the New Conservatives, one of the many factions chewing on the liver of the Conservative Party. He helped lead the right-wing “rebellion” against the government’s Rwanda bill, and could shape the fate of Rishi Sunak and what comes next. But what does Danny Kruger think, and what do his New Conservatives want?

In Covenant, Kruger argues that the UK has forgotten three pillars of society: Home, meaning family; Neighbourhood, meaning one’s local community; and Nation, meaning one’s country of residence. These bonds have been diluted (Kruger likes his metaphors faint) by material and ideological changes, resulting in general strife and decline.

“The culture war”, Kruger writes, “is a religious conflict about the right gods to worship. […] It is a battle for the strongholds of society itself”. Here Kruger echoes US reactionary Pat Buchanan’s 1992 speech declaring “a cultural war for the soul of America”. (Buchanan rather tellingly painted the culture war as a successor to the Cold War against “godless” socialism – a point to keep in mind.)

Let's bring Kruger down to earth. Before entering parliament, he was a senior fellow at the Legatum Institute, a pro-Brexit think tank run by the Legatum Group, the UAE-based investment firm behind GB News. The Legatum crowd has mastered the art of preaching national populism while being funded by millionaires based in Dubai. Anti-globalism is a funny business.

Kruger spoke at the launch of Legatum’s churchy Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) project last year, which is led by self-help culture warrior Jordan Peterson. Kruger’s New Conservatives (a limited company) received £50,000 from Legatum in December.

National Conservatism March 2023

Held in several countries, NCCs are aligned with Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire behind the data and surveillance company Palantir.

Thiel is one of the main financial backers of Republican politics over the past decade and last year funded campaigns to replace Republican candidates who didn’t support accusations questioning the validity of the 2020 presidential election. Alongside Charlie Kirk, founder of university-based culture war outfit Turning Point, Thiel is a signatory of the National Conservatism movement’s statement of principles and has been a speaker at most NCC events. He is due to speak at the London event.

Chair of the NCC is Christopher DeMuth. DeMuth is a fellow of the Hudson Institute which receives funding from the Koch Foundation and Exxon Mobil, he was also president of the American Enterprise Institute from 1986-2008 which has received $960,000 funding from Exxon Mobil since 2005 and $2.5milllion from the Donor’s Capital Fund in 2010 – an organisation enabling rich activists to support conservative causes anonymously.

Three sitting MPs are also among the speakers, Michael Gove, Miriam Cates and Danny Kruger. Conservative peer and former Brexit Secretary David Frost is also speaking.

The Free Speech Union (FSU) is also well represented with its Chair Nigel Biggar, Legal Advisory Council members Mathew Goodwin and David Goodhart of the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, and Eric Kaufman and James Orr of the FSU’s Advisory Council all named as speakers. Orr is also listed as being on the NCC Committee as chair of NatCON UK. FSU founder Douglas Murray spoke at the 2019 London conference.

https://bylinetimes.com/2023/03/10/mps-links-to-christian-nationalism-revealed/

New Social Covenant

Cates and Kruger have their own initiative seeking to advance the National Conservatism called the New Social Covenant (NSC), which they founded in 2021 with Imogen Sinclair who was previously employed by Krugger as a parliamentary staffer. Sinclair is on the London 2023 NCC conference committee. Nigel Biggar and James Orr are NSC board members.

The NSC ethos combines nationalism and conservative Christianity, the opening section of their 12 Propositions for a New Social Contract written by Kruger states “The liberal idea is a perversion of the Christian one”, while the final proposition is focused on the need for the state to actively support marriage “the essential component of a virtuous society.”

Marriage, defined as being between a man and a woman is described as “the regulation of baby making”, and “a matter of public interest.” Stating “No successful society in history has practised an unregulated free for all….In every successful society, the explicit deal is that sex comes with commitment.”

In the social covenant Kruger merges Christian “virtues” with patriotism while saying the role of government should shrink to as it was before the mid 1900s, the NSC calls for the state to increase its role in promoting culture, traditions and patriotism.

“The great threat to liberty is elite estrangement, the supercilious disdain for patriotism by leading public servants, academics, and the lobbyists who gain airtime in our public debates.” Saying that the social covenant “Ensure the public conversation reflects the customs of the country.”

Using language reminiscent of DeSantis’ recent authoritarian legislation against academic freedom the NSC says “The trend within academia to systematically denigrate our country’s history and its heroes is an abuse of the social covenant.” Which according to the NSC would see those considered unpatriotic to be defunded.” This would also include religious teachings that exhort believers “to live in active enmity” to “mainstream society”, and “the new politics of race, sex and gender that has adapted the economic analysis of Marxism.”

2023 Conservative Party Conference

There was gas-a-plenty elsewhere at conference, in the ‘Think Tent’ hosted by the Truss-supporting Tufton Street think tanks the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Taxpayers’ Alliance.

At a session titled “Can we ever really take back control?” a panel of Conservative MPs lashed out at what they called the “shadow state” running the country.

“The penny is dropping among people in Westminster that the Government doesn’t run the Government”, the Conservative MP Danny Kruger told the room, suggesting that it was instead run by a shadowy “blob” of quangos, civil servants and publicly-funded charities.

While acknowledging that the public “hate it” when the party that has actually been in power for the last 13 years claims not to have actually been the ones in charge, Kruger insisted that the problem of these shadowy alternative power bases had to be sorted out.

“We need to do much more to mitigate and address the natural tendency of Government to imagine the response to any crisis is another huge institution and parastatal organisation, including at the global level”, Kruger said.

“We need to do much more to mitigate and address the natural tendency of Government to imagine the response to any crisis is another huge institution and parastatal organisation, including at the global level”, Kruger said.

Dipping into the realms of outright conspiracy theory, he added that “there’s a huge movement going on globally, to create essentially a world government that will have power to dictate to national governments what they should do, both in the anticipation of another pandemic, but also in the event of a pandemic”.

“There can be no more greater threat to our national democracy”.

https://bylinetimes.com/2023/10/02/unleash-that-gas-the-conservative-partys-radical-right-takes-over-in-manchester/

Further Reading