Danny Kruger’s Global Sermon: Can a Tory MP Sell Medieval Morals to a Post-Liberal World?

Deauville, Normandy – While most of the planet was busy Googling “heat dome” and “interest rate zombie,” an improbably well-tailored Conservative back-bencher named Danny Kruger spent last week reassuring a roomful of French senators that, yes, the Anglo-Saxon world can still produce a moral philosopher who doesn’t look like he’s just escaped a hedge fund. The occasion was the annual Anglo-French Parliamentary Dialogue, a sort of diplomatic speed-dating session where the wine is always better than the communiqué. Kruger, MP for the picaresquely named Devizes (population 17,000, three defunct breweries, one haunted canal), arrived clutching a speech titled “Civilisation After Liberalism,” which is French for “please don’t mention Boris.”

To the average café-tabac patron, the name Danny Kruger rings no bells; to Westminster Kremlinologists he’s the ghostwriter of David Cameron’s 2006 “hug-a-hoodie” speech and, more recently, the architect of the UK’s “family hubs” policy—state-funded confessionals where new parents can swap colic tips and existential dread. Abroad, however, his quiet evangelism for “communitarian conservatism” has found unlikely disciples from São Paulo’s favela mayors to South Korea’s birth-rate czars, all of whom like the cut of a Tory jib that manages to sound reactionary and crunchy-granola at the same time. Think Edmund Burke in birkenstocks, clutching a reusable KeepCup.

Kruger’s big idea—delivered in French that sounded suspiciously like he’d rehearsed it in the Eurostar loo—is that liberal individualism has “atomised” society to the point where even dating apps are filing for loneliness. The prescription: resurrect “little platoons” (Burke’s phrase, not a tribute act) and let churches, mosques, and amateur brass bands deliver the welfare state by stealth. The French nodded politely; they’ve been subsidising accordion collectives since the reign of Louis-Philippe, but it’s always charming when a Brit rediscovers society like he’s just invented cheese.

Globally, the timing is either propitious or grimly comic, depending on your antidepressant dosage. From Lagos to Lima, governments are discovering that GDP is a thin blanket against social unraveling; trust in institutions is plummeting faster than crypto. Kruger’s shtick—let volunteers do the hugging while the state keeps the receipts—offers a cost-effective placebo. The World Bank, ever eager to slap a neoliberal band-aid on a sucking chest wound, is piloting “family hubs” in Jordanian refugee camps, minus the lattes. Meanwhile, Singapore’s Ministry of Social and Family Development has translated his pamphlet into Mandarin, presumably under the title “How to Breed Without Looking Like a Peasant.”

Back home, Labour is already rehearsing the attack line: “Tory MP wants churches to run foodbanks—what next, baptisms for broadband?” But abroad, the left is flirting with Krugerism. Spain’s Podemos recently floated “barrio cooperatives” to tackle rural depopulation, and even Bernie Sanders has been spotted quoting the line that “markets are good servants but terrible masters”—though his staff later clarified he thought Kruger was a Scandinavian death-metal band.

Of course, grand theories tend to dissolve on contact with pavement. The last time Britain tried the Big Society, its biggest achievement was a photo-op in a closed-down library. Kruger insists this time is different because the money will follow the moth-eaten hymn books—£300 million over three years, or roughly what the Pentagon misplaces annually in couch cushions. Still, in a world where TikTok therapists charge by the minute and suicide drones double as postal workers, any scheme that treats human beings as more than data points or collateral damage feels almost quaint—like a rotary phone that still connects you to a living soul.

Whether Danny Kruger is the future or merely a nostalgia act in a Savile Row suit remains, fittingly, a matter of faith. But as the Channel fog rolled in and the senators returned to arguing about submarine contracts, one couldn’t help but admire the audacity: a middle-rank British MP pitching medieval guilds to the birthplace of the Rights of Man. Somewhere in the afterlife, Voltaire is lighting a cigarette and muttering, “Écrasez l’infâme, but first, let’s hear the brass band.”