Donald Trump’s first term in office was widely seen as chaotic.He did not expect to win, and his administration did not seem to have much of a clue as to what it wanted to achieve.His second administration is also chaotic, but it is effective and purposeful in away that the first one wasn’t (which is largely why authoritarianism is being enforced so rapidly).This time Trump seems to know what to do with the levers in power, and that is partly because his allies worked up detailed plans for government ahead of 2020 presidential election, even publishing a 900-page manifesto, Project 2025.(During the campaign, when its extreme proposals started getting negative attention, Trump falsely claimed he had nothing to do with it.

But now it is being implemented,)All this is worth knowing because it explains, at least in part, what Danny Kruger is doing for Reform UK,He has been told by Nigel Farage to get the party ready for government,Today, in a speech and Q&A with Zia Yusuf, Reform’s head of policy, he set out some of his thinking,He was focusing on machinery of government matters, not policy.

But if Farage ever were to form a government, these are proposals what would change quite radically the governance of Britain,Here are the main points,Kruger said that Reform UK would take on the government machine just as Donald Trump is doing in Washington,Asked if he would emulate Trump in taking on the machinery of government, Kruger replied:In a nutshell, yes,I think he came into government with exactly the same analysis that we have, which is that in his case the federal government wasn’t under the control of the administration.

And he has taken deliberate steps to bring it back under control.Kruger said that Reform did not agree with everything Trump has been doing.And he said he was not sure if the party would would “emulate his style”.But it would adopt his radicalism, he said.We are very serious about making profoundly deep, structural change to the system.

Yusuf said Nigel Farage wanted to fill about half his cabinet with experienced outsiders who did not have seats in the Commons or the Lords.He said that cabinet is currently too big to be an effective decision making body, and that Farage wanted it to be smaller.He went on:Nigel is extremely open to the idea of maybe around half of those cabinet ministers to not be members of parliament.That is not because we don’t have confidence in our [candidates to be MPs].But the kind of people we are looking for, not all of them will want to run a campaign and do constituency work too.

We are competing with countries, like China, like America for example, in certain ways.You’ve got to ask yourself, [Scott] Bessent, the [US] Treasury secretary, isn’t also doing constituency surgeries about the chlorine levels in the local swimming pool.We have to ask ourselves, is that necessarily the best use of time for people who are holding some the highest offices in the land.In theory there is nothing to stop the PM appointing someone without a seat in the Commons or the Lords to sit in cabinet.But in the past it has only happened very rarely, and never on the scale proposed by Yusuf.

However, Farage has often spoken about the attractions of a US-style system, where the executive is separate from the legislature.Kruger said that wanted to give ministers much stronger powers over civil servants, including proper hire and fire powers.While officials are in theory accountable to ministers, in practice that is not the case, he said.Civil servants should not block the will of an elected government, he said.We will reform the civil service code to ensure that officials at the top of the civil service, and certainly those at the centre of government, are directly answerable to politicians, including for their jobs …We obviously recognise the huge value of a professional civil service in this country.

Nevertheless, we want it to be under proper political control,Kruger said Reform has not yet decided what the right mix should be between career civil servants and political appointees,Currently, very few government officials are political appointees,Kruger was implying a move towards the US system, where thousands of government jobs go to partisan supporters of the president, and the people all get replaced when a new administration comes in,Kruger said he wanted the size of the civil service to fall “dramatically”.

He said the civil service was 30% smaller than it is now before Brexit, and he said he wanted to “at least” get it back to that size,Britain used to administer an empire from a couple of buildings grouped around Downing Street,In the 1820s Sir Robert Peel ran the Home Office,Lloyd George delivered the People’s Budget in 1911 with a Treasury of 26 people,And, of course, in those days, Westminster was a residential district.

Now, in 2025, it’s a wasteland of acronyms, the MoJ, the DWP, the DfT, the DfE, the DHSC, the MHCLG, all housed in these great glass and steel towers, mostly empty because everyone is working from home,He said that there were five big office buildings in Westminster housing government offices that together cost £100m a year to rent,Those leases were coming up for renewal before the next parliament,Reform would not renew them, he said,Kruger said that Reform would rewrite the ministerial code, in particular removing the obligation on ministers to obey international law.

He said he had a “glaring objection” to this.He said Reform would also rewrite the civil service code to impose a wider definition of impartiality.The definition of impartiality is too narrow in the current civil service code.It’s defined simply as being party political, which, of course, they shouldn’t be.But there’s a whole range of other political affiliations or commitments that civil service can have and introduce through their work that might not have a party political label, but is nevertheless essentially political.

The whole the DEI [diversity, equity, inclusion]/woke agenda that has infected so much of Whitehall will be in contravention of the civil service code that we introduce.Socially controversial political positions will not be acceptable in the civil service.He said Reform would not allow the House of Lords to “obstruct legislation passed by parliament”.Reform also would have to create new peers, he said.And he said Keir Starmer should start creating new Reform peers before the election.

He said:We’d like the prime minister to get on with that, and start doing that in this parliament to reflect the reality of public opinion,Kruger said that Reform UK would make sure that it had constitutional reform legislation “ready to go” as soon as it took office,He said that he would like to improve the way parliament scrutinises legislation,In particular he praised Ian Dunt’s book How Westminster Works … and Why It Doesn’t, saying that what it revealed about how badly laws are scrutinised before they are passed was “particularly shameful” for parliamentarians to read,(It is an excellent book, although Dunt, who is a progressive, may be horrified to find out that Danny Kruger may be more interested in his proposals than Keir Starmer.

)There was one obvious omission from Kruger’s contitutional reform wishlist,The Reform UK manifesto in 2024 called for proportional representation,That was when first-past-the-post was holding the party back,But now, given their support in the polls, FPTP would disproportionately favour Reform, not handicap them, and PR seems to have fallen off the agenda,Reform UK would allow ministers to ignore international law and give them the ability to fire civil servants in a Donald Trump-style overhaul of government powers, the party’s new efficiency tsar has said.

Rachel Reeves will have to account for a bigger-than-expected £20bn hit to the UK public finances in next month’s budget, increasing the likelihood that the chancellor will breach a key Labour’s manifesto pledge not to raise income tax.Refugee organisations have described plans to house thousands of asylum seekers in two disused military sites as fanciful and too expensive as local discontent grows.Ministers have agreed to give bankrupt Woking council an “unprecedented” £500m taxpayer bailout under government plans to merge a dozen local authorities in Surrey.The boss of the UK’s main betting and gaming lobby group has told MPs that there is no “social ill with gambling” as she warned against imposing higher taxes on the sector in the November budget.For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.

Labour has said that Reform UK’s plan to save £500m over the course of a parliament by closing big departmental offices in Whitehall is flawed because the current government is going to end those contracts anyway.At a press conference this morning, Danny Kruger said that he had identified how his party could save £100m a year – or £500m over the course of a parliament – but terminated the leases on five office buildings in Westminster.(See 2.42pm.)But Anna Turley, the Labour chair, said the government announced very similar plans earlier this year.

She said:It’s deeply embarrassing for Nigel Farage that his new policy chief’s first policy has already fallen apart.You can’t save money by closing government buildings that are already closing.Danny Kruger didn’t do the work and he’s been found out.It’s the same at local level.Reform made big claims about the money they could save in councils, found they were wrong, and are now proposing raising council tax and cutting services.

Local government was supposed to be the blueprint for what Reform would do nationally, and it’s true: their savings plans collapse at the first contact with reality.It’s a serious case of Doge-ja vu.John Major has become the second former Conservative PM in less than 24 hours to warn his party against embracing populism.In a speech to a Tory lunch today, Major, who led the party from 1990 to 1997, said that many traditional supporters feel “politically homeless” because of the way that the party has lurched to the right.Like Theresa May, who delivered a speech covering the party’s future last night (see 11.

55am), Major argued that embracing populism would be disastrous for his party,He criticised the party’s current leadership for its stance on climate change, as May did in her speech,But Major’s attack on his party’s record went far beyond what has happened over the past 12 months,He implied that the party lost its way some years ago, and his only direct references to Kemi Badenoch were positive ones,Major said that the Conservative party succeeded in the past when it was “a coalition of ideas” but that over time moderate views stopped being tolerated.

He went on:So ‒ when our party says “No” to Europe,“No” to climate change,“No” to overseas aid – it falls out with the majority of public opinion,Such policies may delight a minority of opinion, but not the broad mass of electors in our essentially tolerant and kindly nation: it seriously alienates many of them,This world of “No” gives a false impression of our party.

We do not believe in “No” to helping others or – as our opponents falsely claim – “Yes” to helping ourselves,This loss of pragmatism, tolerance, nuance ‒ call it what you will ‒ has left many long-term Conservative supporters politically homeless,They are not socialists or liberals – nor ever will be – but the form of Conservatism they had always supported seemed to have been cast aside,Whenever our party lurches too far to the right ‒ or condemns moderate Conservatives ‒ it pulls us further away from the traditional mass of our vote,We can almost see and feel our vote moving away from us.

If you look at the results of recent byelections the evidence is clear to see.Major was damning about the notion that populism offers the party a way forward.Unthinking populism has already wrecked our trade with Europe and made us poorer, weaker, and less relevant in the wider world.Do not allow it to take away the decencies and civilities of our country as well.While Badenoch has clearly adopted a populist approach in some areas, Major did not critcise her directly for this and he praised her for setting up commissions to work on long-term policy.

“It It showcases serious intent.More please,” he said.He also said she was right to rule out an alliance with Reform UK.The majority of Conservative voters understand that – if we were to allay with [Reform UK] – we would forever destroy the tolerant, broad-based, national party that once we were – and can be again.It would be beyond stupid.

And he also struck a note of optimism for Tories,The possibility of electoral recovery is better than many believe,The electorate is less committed to any one political party than, perhaps, at any time in the last 65 years,We are now a nation of floating voters, and the Conservatives must offer sound reasons for them to float to us,In a nation disillusioned with politics we must re-offer hope and integrity