“Could Danny Kruger save the Conservatives?,” ran a headline on a column by Mary Wakefield, the Spectator’s commissioning editor, way back in, er, August 2025.
Wakefield had “seen signs of life in the Conservative Party”, she reassured worried readers, drawing their attention to a video she had watched on YouTube of “a speech that a Tory MP gave in the House of Commons and… I don’t know. I felt hope”.
“The MP was Danny Kruger, member for East Wiltshire, and as it happens he’s a friend of mine,” she went on. “I’ll say straight away then that this is absolutely not an attempt to promote him as next leader, though the post-Kemi era does seem to be approaching fast.”
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In the speech, Kruger made the argument that Britain was still fundamentally a Christian nation and that everyone was a member of the Church of England “like it or not, through the parish system”. Wakefield’s argument was that, while strong Christian faith had held people like Kruger back in the Tory party in the days of David Cameron and his ilk, God was back: “Look at the growing appetite for Jordan Peterson, who points to the Bible as a store of wisdom.”
Now, little more than a month later, Kruger has defected to Reform, putting himself and his faith under the leadership of the twice-divorced Farage, who even confessed to Peterson in an on-stage interview earlier this year that he “may not necessarily be the best advocate for monogamous heterosexuality” the Canadian oddball was calling for.
And Wakefield, in not anticipating her “friend”’s move, has shown herself to be the country’s second-worst soothsayer – after her husband, keen Substacker Dominic Cummings!
