Danny Kruger MP: speeches 2026

Speeches

• 21 Apr 2026 · Peter Mandelson: Government Appointment · Hansard source

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  The Prime Minister came to this House only yesterday saying, “I will now set out the full timeline”, —[ Official Report , 20 April 2026; Vol. 784, c. 23.] and later insisting that he had come to “give the full account to the House”. —[ Official Report , 20 April 2026; Vol. 784, c. 28.] That followed Downing Street’s acceptance earlier in the day that his previous account had, at the very least, inadvertently misled Members. Yesterday was meant to be the great clean-up—the day of the full facts, full candour and full accountability. Today, Sir Olly Robbins gave evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee and published a letter that blows a hole straight through the Prime Minister’s version of events. Many hon. Members have already exposed that. Obviously, the lack of curiosity on behalf of the Prime Minister was inexplicable and reprehensible. We have seen evasion, obfuscation and blame shifting, as well as blatant contradictions, and I want to point out one that has not yet surfaced this afternoon. The Prime Minister said that he was “astonished”, and that it was “incredible”, that information could have been withheld from him, but it is significant that Sir Olly Robbins’s letter says that the position conveyed to the Foreign Affairs Committee in September 2025—that “Ministers…are not informed of any findings other than the final outcome”— was “agreed with” the Cabinet Office and No. 10. In other words, the Prime Minister is now trying to dump the entire scandal on one official for acting on a position that Downing Street itself had signed off. That is not accountability; that is a stich-up. Worse still, we learned today that, before Sir Olly even took over, due diligence on Mandelson’s appointment had been completed, approval had been given by His Majesty, the appointment had been announced, agrément had been secured from the United States, Mandelson had building and IT access, and he was already receiving highly classified briefings on a case-by-case basis. We have even learned that the Cabinet Office itself raised whether developed vetting was necessary, and the FCDO had to insist on it. So let us drop the pretence that this was some neutral, pristine process derailed by one mandarin misconducting himself. The appointment was politically driven from the top and forced through in an atmosphere of pressure. Of course the Prime Minister’s position is untenable, as many Members have said, but it is possible that the Prime Minister’s honesty or position is not the most important thing about this saga. What matters even more is our system of government, for which the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister is partly responsible. If the Prime Minister has been surprised to find that the civil service acts within processes that screen Ministers from information and from the power to make decisions, no one else is surprised about that. I think the Prime Minister has spent so long as a civil servant and then as a politician behaving like a civil servant that, when he finds that the system does not work, he has a sort of professional breakdown and starts spluttering about process and reviews, and reviews of the processes. Yes, we need process, but the fact is that appointments, like everything else the Government do, are political decisions. Politics is simply the management of the common life of the community, and the management of trade-offs between different ideas and interests. We in this country have developed over many years a model of doing things—of doing politics—that is or was the best in the world: civil servants accountable to Ministers accountable to Parliament accountable to the public. Break those links of accountability, and instead of a hierarchy with the public at the top, ultimately in charge through the ballot box, and civil servants at the bottom—genuinely the servants of the democratically elected masters—we have unaccountable civil servants at the top, Ministers floundering around as this lot are, Parliament is pointless and the public are outraged. What has to change is the great restoration of the principle that the civil service serves the public, and it does that by respecting the ultimate responsibility of Ministers as decision makers. It is absurd to have rules that shield the decision makers from the information they need to make a decision, and no other organisation would do that. This is why we need to restore the Armstrong principle set out by Robert Armstrong in 1985: “The civil service…has no constitutional personality or responsibility separate from the duly elected Government of the day.” —[ Official Report , 26 February 1985; Vol. 74, c. 129W.] Yes, I want to see the back of this Prime Minister, but most of all I want to dismantle the cabal of permanent secretaries who run this country and to restore the proper authority of Parliament.

• 20 Apr 2026 · Security Vetting · Hansard source

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  If Olly Robbins could and should have provided this information to the Prime Minister at the first opportunity, as the Prime Minister has said today, surely the same applies to Cat Little, Antonia Romeo and the Cabinet Office officials who sat on this information for nearly a month before bringing it to the Prime Minister when The Guardian started asking questions of No. 10. Why does he accept that they needed legal advice to do what he is saying should have been obvious? He sacked Olly Robbins for not bringing him that information immediately; why are the others still in post?

• 13 Apr 2026 · North Atlantic Submarine Activity · Hansard source

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  I pay tribute to the Royal Navy and echo the point made by the Minister in respect of our brave personnel. I agree with him that we have the best Navy in the world—I just wish it were larger. I am unclear from what the Minister has said about whether we have had more than a narrative of what has happened over the last month and of our capabilities in respect of these events. What has actually changed in the Government’s planning with respect to defending our undersea infrastructure from Russia, in terms of either the disposition of our forces or procurement, perhaps? Also, he mentions the resilience of our undersea infrastructure. Can he tell the House a little about what plans we have to cope with an attack on undersea cables and how quickly we could recover from one?

• 13 Apr 2026 · Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill · Hansard source

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  I very much welcome the Government’s withdrawal of the Bill. I have two questions about the future commitment of this country to the Chagossian people and the Chagos islands. First, will the Government commit that if there is to be any future constitutional change to the status of the islands, the Chagossian community here in the UK will be given the chance to express its view through a referendum of that community? My second question relates to the heroic landing by my friend and new fellow Reform member, Adam Holloway, who made the brave journey to Reform, as well as journeying to the Chagos islands with a group of islanders. I remind the Minister that those people were forcibly removed from their homes by a Labour Government in the 1970s. The infrastructure that they left behind is now descending into jungle. Why will the Government not recognise that they have a right of abode there, and why are the Government frustrating the very legitimate efforts of philanthropists to support them to re-establish their community?

• 3 Mar 2026 · Small Charity Sector · Hansard source

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  This is such an important debate. I want to pick up on the suggestion of the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell). Although it is obviously very helpful if small charities, which do not have financial resources or indeed necessarily the right data, can demonstrate their value to the public sector, let us not build systems that force charities into a model that really works only for public sector agencies or large charities. The whole value of these small projects is that they do not have those clear processes, outputs and data, with everything being reduced to unit costs. We have to have a system that actually honours the way that charities work, rather than trying to force them into some kind of proxy of that quantitative model for demonstrating value. Why do we not just localise public sector funding so that small charities can be properly trusted?

• 3 Mar 2026 · Small Charity Sector · Hansard source

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  I have two quick declarations of interest. I am the founder and still chairman of a charity working in prisons. It is 21 years old this year. My second declaration of interest is the fealty I owe to the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith)—my original, and still my feudal lord. He is the leader that I first worked for. I pay tribute to all the work he has done over many years. I remember very well the Easterhouse visit and setting up the Centre for Social Justice, and all the work that he has done over the last two decades to advance the cause of social justice, particularly through the work of small charities. We all love our small charities, and I, too, could run through a list of brilliant ones that work in East Wiltshire—I do want to quickly mention the LINK service, which drives people around the county, particularly to medical appointments. That is such an important service, provided totally free and voluntarily to the community. However, I want to use the time I have to make a more strategic point. The role of small charities is not just for us as MPs to champion in a sort of neutral sense—“Oh, aren’t they good?” There is something profoundly important about this network for public policy. I was involved, as the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green was, in those early years of thinking about social responsibility in the era of David Cameron. I think the big society was the best thing that David Cameron did—except perhaps for calling a referendum on the European Union—yet it did not quite work. It did not quite work for two main reasons. One is that the Treasury did not really believe in it— George Osborne never got the point of the charity sector and its role in public life and in policy. Secondly, the difficulty is that if the state starts to support charities, it ends up basically enabling big charities to occupy the space that state agencies did previously. They effectively game the provisions that are made with the purpose of supporting the small charity sector, to exclude the small charities and create barriers to entry for those small organisations that it is so difficult for national Government to see and to work with. Fundamentally, we need a big, new settlement with the charity sector; in fact, with society itself. This is not just about registered charities. It is about social organisations in all their forms. We need to trust communities much more fully, with all the mess, the disparity and what is called the postcode lottery that that can sometimes induce. We need to support philanthropy and direct public support—I think the United Kingdom could become the absolute global centre of philanthropy. The City of London should regard that as one of its key investment markets. But this is not actually just about money, private or public. It is about the state enabling and authorising its agency throughout the public sector to rely meaningfully on the charity sector, so that it can do that in all the areas we have been discussing, including addiction, re-offending, homelessness, children in care—these knotty, wicked problems that cause so much distress and pain in our society and which the state is so inadequate at dealing with.

• 2 Mar 2026 · Middle East · Hansard source

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  I do not know what is more humiliating for the United Kingdom: the moral weakness of a Government who cannot distinguish between right and wrong, and who cannot even take a sovereign decision without consulting international lawyers; or the material weakness of a country that has just decommissioned its last frigate in the Gulf and, as the Prime Minister has said in his statement, does not have the capability to defend our own citizens in the region. Given this position of neutrality and impotence, will the Prime Minister clarify what exactly he means by defensive versus offensive action? The whole operation is offensive according to the terms that the Prime Minister has set out. Or does he expect that the British will have some sort of operational veto on individual American flights that take off from our bases?

• 2 Mar 2026 · Representation of the People Bill · Hansard source

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  That is our party position. The importance of ruling out foreign interference in our democracy has been made repeatedly in the debate. Let me actually address the glaring foreign interference that we have, and which we saw in Gorton and Denton last week. I am sorry to say that it has not been mentioned in the debate so far. We have been talking about one disgraceful incident while mass abuse of our democracy has been going on. It appears from the evidence of independent observers that as many as two thirds of polling stations had compromised voting in that election last week. As many as one in eight votes may have been cast under coercion—under pressure of family voting. That is a deplorable state of affairs, and it should be the focus of the whole House to understand what happened. It is important that we speak truthfully and honestly in this place, so I will say what is clearly true and what we all know: we are talking about south-east Asian communities, as has been clearly and objectively demonstrated in the past. We are talking about people taking their orders on how to vote from mosques and from clans—often direct from Pakistan. We are seeing the criminal abuse of democracy by Labour—

• 2 Mar 2026 · Representation of the People Bill · Hansard source

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  I will finish the point and then certainly give way to both gentlemen. We are seeing the criminal abuse of British democracy by Labour, and now by the Green party. This malignant new force has now occupied—

• 2 Mar 2026 · Representation of the People Bill · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am sorry if I inadvertently suggested that it was a party that was abusing our electoral system. What I am actually suggesting is that there is abuse of our electoral system through an influential network that applies in these constituencies. That appears to be the case.

• 2 Mar 2026 · Representation of the People Bill · Hansard source

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  I am delighted to agree with the hon. Gentleman. That is exactly the principle that should be applied.

• 2 Mar 2026 · Representation of the People Bill · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. It is absolutely right that we have this debate. I am citing evidence provided by Democracy Volunteers, the independent observers who were present in the polling stations last week. It is important that we look into it. It is obviously impossible to tell definitively at this stage exactly what went on, but it is clear from these independent observers that serious abuse seems to have been practised.

• 2 Mar 2026 · Representation of the People Bill · Hansard source

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  That is exactly what I think, and every British citizen should be able—

• 2 Mar 2026 · Representation of the People Bill · Hansard source

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  We already prevent young people at that age from driving, from buying cigarettes and alcohol, and from standing for Parliament. We already conclude that they are not responsible enough in general. Obviously, many are far more responsible than adults, but the conclusion is that they are still children and that they should not be exercising this vital responsibility in respect of our whole democracy until they are 18. I will quickly mention the Rycroft review. May I stress on behalf of the Reform party how much I welcome the review? Many hon. Members rightly mentioned the disgraceful episode of a former Reform MEP taking bribes from a foreign state. It is absolutely right that we look closely into the circumstances that allowed that to arise. We will wait and see what the review comes up with, but it is quite right that we take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that we do not have foreign financial interference in our democracy.

• 2 Mar 2026 · Representation of the People Bill · Hansard source

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  Let me start by expressing my commiseration with my former hon. Friend—he is still my friend—the hon. Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman), who was inadvertently confused with somebody who might want to join the Reform party. It is difficult to imagine a Member less likely to want to do that, or indeed to be received by the Reform party, than him—I am sure he is happy to hear that. That is perhaps except for the shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Braintree (Sir James Cleverly)—but he once had his own problems with counting votes in a Conservative party election. I am not going to address the absurd suggestion of votes at 16 as that has been well dealt with by other hon. Members. In particular, there is the obvious point suggested by hon. Members that because young people can sign up to join the Army when they are 16, they should be able to vote. The fact is, they can join the Army not to go and fight, but only as a cadet, and only with parental consent. To anybody suggesting that that somehow means that they should be able to vote, I invite them to suggest whether they think their parents should also be giving consent on how they vote in the voting booth. I think not. I will however come to family voting in a moment.

• 2 Mar 2026 · Representation of the People Bill · Hansard source

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  I should have started by congratulating the new hon. Member on her personal victory. I am, however, very concerned about the circumstances in which many of those votes were cast. I am not plucking this concern out of the air; it is clearly apparent that there is widespread concern, and this is not the first time that it has happened.

• 23 Feb 2026 · Lord Mandelson: Government Response to Humble Address · Hansard source

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  I wish I had started counting at the beginning of this statement how often the Chief Secretary used the word “process”. The word that I have been listening out for and have not heard him say is “responsibility”. Does he accept that it is the job of the Prime Minister to make all these appointments without reference to backroom bureaucrats and lawyers? Should he not accept that he made a terrible mistake in respect of Peter Mandelson, do the right thing and reveal all the papers immediately?

• 23 Feb 2026 · Labour Together and APCO Worldwide: Cabinet Office Review · Hansard source

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  The Government are hiding behind process as usual, even when the process is so clearly compromised, as in this case. First, we hear that the propriety and ethics team are looking at this matter even though we know that the leader of that team is a former Labour Together staffer who was appointed according to inappropriate process. I would be grateful if the Minister repeated and perhaps explained the extraordinary claim he made earlier from the Dispatch Box that it is necessary for the Minister in question to stay in his role so that the independent inquiry can be carried out. It is an absolutely extraordinary suggestion—could he explain it? Secondly, could he simply confirm to the House that it is for the Prime Minister to appoint and dismiss Ministers without reference to independent inquiries, and that he is perfectly capable of making the right decision now?

• 2 Feb 2026 · China and Japan · Hansard source

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  The Prime Minister is very full of the abstract virtue of engaging with China and getting in the room with them. He used to say that Britain should not even sign a trade deal with China because of the persecution of the Uyghur people. Having now got into the room with the Chinese leader, can he tell the House a single thing that he achieved on behalf of the Uyghurs, or indeed on behalf of the security of this country?

• 19 Jan 2026 · Arctic Security · Hansard source

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  The Foreign Secretary is, of course, absolutely right to insist that the future of Greenland is a question only for the people of Greenland, but does she acknowledge that this crisis is the consequence of our weakness—of decades of failure on the part of Europe and the UK to invest in defence, and, indeed, of a historic failure of statecraft on the part of the United Kingdom? One naval officer went to Greenland, and as a consequence, 10% tariffs are to be imposed on us. The Foreign Secretary mentioned a conversation that she had in Scandinavia last week. Did she offer to do more than simply co-operate with our partners and neighbours, and to actually lead in the defence of Greenland by committing a proper joint expeditionary force, led by the UK, with a proper commitment to ensuring the safety of Greenland?

• 13 Jan 2026 · Nigeria: Freedom of Religion or Belief · Hansard source

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  I, too, think it is a very good thing that the hon. Gentleman has taken this role. He mentions the impact of this issue around the world. He is absolutely right to say that what is going in Nigeria is the worst example, but it represents a pattern of Islamist persecution of Christians. It is not just a series of individual atrocities; there is a global pattern of Islamist persecution of Christians. It is right that we in this House acknowledge that. Does he agree?

• 7 Jan 2026 · UK Town of Culture · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to listen to these wonderful encomia for our towns, and I am going to add my voice on behalf of Wiltshire, and particularly Amesbury. I would be delighted if Marlborough, the other big town in my constituency, were to win the competition, but I want to speak particularly for Amesbury. I was struck by the hon. Member for Halesowen (Alex Ballinger), who made a very good speech on behalf of his constituency, boasting about its important link with the history of heavy metal. Anyone who has seen the film “This Is Spinal Tap” will know that in fact it is Stonehenge that is the genuine heart of the history of heavy metal. On that ground, if nothing else, surely Amesbury should win, because it is the town of Stonehenge. I will return to that point in a moment. The hon. Gentleman for Redditch (Chris Bloore) intervened to suggest that the award should be about the future. I disagree. Surely it should be about the history of our places. There is no place in these islands with a longer, and therefore greater, history than Amesbury, because it is the oldest continually inhabited settlement in the British Isles. People were living there a very, very long time ago, in 8820 BC. In fact, the grave of what we now call the Amesbury archer—a man buried with a bow and arrow and various other valuable artefacts—was discovered in Amesbury some time ago. DNA testing has demonstrated that he came to Amesbury from the Swiss alps many centuries ago, in the days when this country was still connected to Europe by a land bridge. Those who believe we should rejoin our continental neighbours under some sort of terrible political union might be inspired to think of Amesbury as a place where that was demonstrated millennia ago. Thousands of years after the original settlement, Stonehenge was built, and it stands as the greatest monument to a now forgotten civilisation—the heart of England from which so much derived. The great world heritage site that is the central district of Wiltshire is to be found in Amesbury. It is the site of Romans, Saxons and the myths of King Arthur, whose wife Guinevere is apparently buried in Amesbury—who can tell? We do know that King Alfred left the manor of Amesbury to his son. A little later, in the pre-Norman era, the first church was built there, and its remains are still there. Subsequently, and significantly, the remains of the only monarch of England whose whereabouts are not precisely known are believed to be somewhere in Amesbury. Queen Eleanor of Provence, the wife of Henry III, died somewhere in the area in 1291. We are hopeful that in the coming years we will discover her actual burial place and have a fitting memorial. Having made the point about Amesbury’s past, I want to conclude by saying that it is a very vibrant, genuinely warm community that is rich in existing possibility and, indeed, in prosperity. It is part of the world heritage site, although sadly bisected from Stonehenge itself by the A303. We had been led to believe there was going to be a significant investment in tunnelling that road, which would have connected the town more closely to the site, but that is now not happening. Nevertheless, there is an enormous opportunity, and it is really important for Wiltshire that the town that hosts the museum for Stonehenge and is, as I say, the source of such amazing heritage should be able to benefit from the millions of tourists who come through every year. I hope that, through the town of culture award, we can recognise the importance of Amesbury locally, nationally and internationally.

• 5 Jan 2026 · Venezuela · Hansard source

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  The Biden Administration offered a $25 million reward for the capture and detention of President Maduro, and this country has passively supported regime change in Venezuela since we froze the gold reserves held at the Bank of England in 2019. Now that President Trump has followed through on the implicit policy of both our countries and achieved the outcome that the whole world wanted, can the Foreign Secretary tell the House what conditions will need to be met for the money that is owned by the Venezuelan people to be returned by the Bank of England?