With Reform UK having more than its fair share of unusually fractious, cranky and argumentative conspiracists, the defection of the sober, God-fearing Tory MP Danny Kruger could not be more opportune for Nigel Farage.
While Farage revels in his reputation as one of the most colourful and controversial figures in politics, Kruger is the opposite. He is a serious, cerebral thinker and an evangelical Christian, allergic to scandal. As one of his former Tory colleagues said to me last week: 'I won't miss any more of Kruger's moralising, finger-wagging sermons, thank you very much.'
Married with three children and a champion of the traditional family, Kruger would have voted against same sex marriage legislation in 2013 if he had been an MP at the time.
His children, aged 15, 13 and 12, rarely watch TV with their Eton- and Oxford-educated father, who is a self-confessed bookworm.
Indeed, sitting in the front room of his double-fronted, three-storey house in Ravenscourt Park in West London – the likes of which sell for upwards of £2.5million – the hallmarks of family life are apparent in the children's school books, but a telly is conspicuous by its absence.
