East Wiltshire MP Danny Kruger, who had been tasked with reviewing the future of the charity sector under Boris Johnson’s administration, has quit the Conservative Party to join Reform UK.

At a press conference this week he said “there have been moments when I have been very proud" to belong to the Tory party, but added that “the Conservative Party is over, over as a national party, over as the principal opposition to the left”.

Kruger, who had been shadow works and pensions minister under Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party leadership, said that 25 years ago he had been “inspired by the Big Society” as well as welfare and education reform under David Cameron's leadership of the party.

But he added that the rule of his former party’s time in office had been “failure”.

He is the second sitting Conservative MP to defect to Reform UK, after Lee Anderson quit the party to join Reform last year.

While as an MP in 2020, then for Devizes before boundary changes, he was asked by then prime minister Boris Johnson to produce a report into community action.

This called for charities to be given more powers to design and deliver public services through legislation.

His report also called for a volunteer passport system to match supply and demand for voluntary help.

Last year he was one of several cross-party MPs, also including Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, calling on the government to give extra funding to the hospice charity sector.

---