Another defection of an experienced insider to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party has been revealed a day after it launched a ‘department for preparing for government’ and called on those who know the state from the inside to come forward and help it make ready for power.
Maria Caulfield, a former health minister under the last Conservative Government between 2022 and 2024 has renounced her erstwhile party and joined Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, she said on Tuesday. The defection is the second announced in two days, and came after Danny Kruger, a senior Tory and present Member of Parliament crossed the floor to join Farage’s faction.
Critically, the move of such a considerable figure as Kruger was predicted to be a potential opening of the floodgates, signalling to other politicians that it is now socially and politically acceptable, and that the time has come, to jump ship. Caulfield joined Reform a month ago, she said, but only went public this morning.
Caulfield left Parliament in 2024 and returned to her previous profession of nursing. She is a specialist cancer research nurse and has previously been knighted by the King for “political and public service”. In recent days she shared a tribute to assassinated political activist Charlie Kirk, stating “Devastating news about [Charlie Kirk,] shot dead by those who disagreed with his views. Charlie was an inspiration and paid the ultimate price for it”, and “I pray for Charlie . I am sure he is with God tonight… Let us all be brave enough to be more like Charlie in our faith”.
Breitbart News previously reported on Caulfield when she defended schoolgirls in her previous constituency who turned up to school wearing skirts as normal, rather than in trousers as a new gender-neutral uniform code proscribed as part of a culture war over transgender issues. In 2024, Caulfield went on record to celebrate the landmark decision by NHS England to ban puberty blockers being given to children.
Caulfield told the GB News broadcaster today that “the future is Reform” and compared naysayers on the party from the right now to those who didn’t believe the pro-Brexit faction would win the historic 2016 referendum. “They are in for a shock”, she predicted.
Decrying the failure to take advantage of Brexit by the Conservatives, Caulfield said: “We let people down over what Brexit meant on laws, money and borders. We took back control but we did not do anything about it… Reform is about changing the system.”
Farage’s Reform UK party has now led every single opinion poll in the United Kingdom for over 100 polls in a row, he said on Monday, highlighting the chance he has of being the largest party in Parliament after the next government. Yet as he has emphasised, Reform’s strength in being a new movement in British politics bringing in many people with no political experience also brings a potential weakness that it lacks the decades of insider-knowledge for when the time to form a government actually comes.
To some extent, this coming to Westminster with fresh eyes may heap on even more advantage: evidently the legacy parties, which are well integrated into the deep government of the Civil Service and law system have long utterly failed to achieve change even when they want to. Yet Farage recognises getting insider knowledge and advice from the experienced is important, and on Monday launched his department for preparing for government, led by defecting Tory Danny Kruger.
Farage said Kruger’s mission would be to “find talent, find people with experience… and help us get ready for what will be a monumental task”.
Kruger, Tory insiders say, was considered one of the deep thinkers of the party and had held “big strategic roles”. On Monday, explaining his mission, Kruger said:
It’s going to be difficult because we are planning change on a scale the system has not seen since the modern civil service was created in the 19th century. This work will be hard and it will be opposed by the system, and that’s why we need to be radical. Taking on the vested interests and the incumbents who always defend the status quo.
Reform UK is a radical force but not a revolutionary one. Our mission is not just to overthrow the current system, but it is to restore the system we need. Limited government, accountable power, a strong society, a state that works in the interest of the people. Radical restoration, that is the reform the country needs… I think we’re going to encounter serious opposition, and part of the purpose of today and the work we’re going to be doing quite publicly in the years and months to come is to be signalling very clearly to the system what is coming, and we want to do that in a civil, constructive way.
We don’t want to pick fights where we don’t need to but it’s essential that the Whitehall Machine understands that if we win there will be change… I think there will be opposition but I am determined we do this in a way that’s constructive… but there are people, quiet people [in the Civil Service], often not in the most senior ranks, who recognise how broken the system is and who will want to help us. So I think it is very important that we signal to those people that we’re not out to get everybody and we want to work constructively with those parts of the machine that recognise that a system designed in the 19th century is no longer remotely fit for purpose.
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