Kemi Badenoch really can’t catch a break. Last week, she seemed to be enjoying a rare moment on the front foot after a strong showing at Prime Minister’s Questions as the Government found itself engulfed in the latest Peter Mandelson crisis. This morning, highly-rated Tory MP Danny Kruger decisively closed that happy window by defecting to Reform UK.

The significance of any individual defection can be difficult to parse, especially in the moment. Kruger has reportedly joined Reform in order to help Nigel Farage’s party prepare for government, but it remains to be seen how much headway he can actually make in that role.

Ultimately, the fundamental challenge for Reform UK remains what it has always been: Farage himself, specifically his refusal to allow the dilution of his own power and freedom of manoeuvre. The party leader has an excellent knack for detecting gaps in his opponents’ armour, and Reform policy will be whatever it needs to be to exploit those gaps.

A previous incarnation of Kruger noticed this. His earlier comments about Reform, while hardly damning, have several times drawn attention to the fundamentally spendthrift nature of Farage’s project. It will be interesting to see whether Kruger can do much to steer the party in a lower-spending direction when nearly all its second-place finishes at the last election were in Labour-held seats.

But regardless of how he fares, his departure is undoubtedly a blow to the Conservatives. Defections to date have had an also-ran character to them: whatever one’s individual assessment of Nadine Dorries or Jake Berry, they were not widely heralded as having any significant role to play in the Tories’ future and neither were sitting MPs.

Kruger is a different beast: not only does he have a reputation as a thinker (although “philosophical powerhouse” is pushing it, unless you’re grading on a parliamentary curve), but he was firmly in the counsel of Robert Jenrick, having run the latter’s leadership campaign last year. His departure is a bad sign for those — whose ranks now include some of Badenoch’s backers in the leadership contest — who hope that Jenrick might imminently become leader and start to turn the ship around.

Whether or not this leads to more defections in turn remains to be seen. Kruger’s reputation might legitimise the move in the minds of waverers, but he marched too much to the beat of his own drum — no bad thing, to be clear — to have a clear caucus of “Krugerrites” who might be expected to follow him automatically.

Farage will also be aware of the dilemma which confronts him regarding defections: while each one provides a sugar hit of media coverage and strikes a body blow to the Tories, it also blurs the lines between the two parties. This isn’t necessarily helpful if one’s sights at the next election are focused overwhelmingly on Labour-held seats, many of which threw out their incumbent Tory by a huge margin.

Alternatively, Kruger’s presence on the Reform benches and potentially in the senior leadership could make the eventual negotiation of some sort of pact or coalition between the two parties easier. There may be some on the Reform side wary of another Douglas Carswell, whose 2014 defection to Ukip was a rare example of somebody in Westminster actually playing 4D chess (he helped Vote Leave secure official designation over Farage’s vehicle, Leave.EU).

But it remains worthwhile to ask whether Kruger is a good fit for his new home. Such a cerebral MP is a loss to the Tories, but he has not joined a cerebral party. Those jumping ship want a new Right-wing party; Reform is the strongest contender to take on this mantle, and so it must be the sort of party they want.

Yet it isn’t and won’t be — at least not more than temporarily and coincidentally, to whatever extent their agenda chimes with what suits Farage at any given moment. It would be quite easy for Reform to kill the Tories, but much harder for the younger party to replace them. If it doesn’t, we may just be watching more of Britain’s already dwindling talent pool marching down a dead end.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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