Reform UK would seize control of civil servants just like Trump in US, says Kruger – UK politics live | Politics

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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.