The New Right’s vision of community depends on obedience, rather than solidarity

Kenan Malik

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Detail from an 1850 book depicting the founder of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, as the 'Great Orator'.

Humans, Danny Kruger insists, “are born greedy, narcissistic and violent”.

“Left entirely to ourselves,” he believes, “individuals will exploit, slack off, rent-seek, and cheat.” The job of society is “to teach us to temper these impulses” and to inculcate virtues such as “courage, temperance, fortitude, creativity, compassion and shrewdness”.

Kruger became, last September, the first sitting Tory MP to join Reform UK. He is now charged with making party policy fit fora prospective Reform government.

The defection of Robert Jenrick to Reform has excited much media coverage. It may be, though, the earlier decamping of Kruger that proves, as Tory grandee and Times columnist Danny Finkelstein recently noted, more significant in shaping the “realignment of the right”, and in particular in answering the question: “What is the right being realigned to?”

Kruger, once chief speechwriter for David Cameron (and responsible for his “hug a hoodie” speech) has become a significant voice in the emergent “New Right”: the challenge to mainstream conservatism posed by movements such as Maga in the USA, parties like Reform UK, and many reactionary and far-right groups in Europe.