Bake Off star Prue Leith and her son, MP Danny Kruger, are appearing on Channel 4 programme Death Road Trip about assisted dying, but who is the Wiltshire politician and what are his views?
The MP for Devizes is the son of Dame Prue Leith, best known for starring alongside Paul Hollywood on Channel 4’s The Great British Bake Off, and will be appearing alongside his mother in a show exploring the morality of assisted dying on the same channel.
Kruger’s political career began in 2003, after being privately educated at Eton College and studying History at Edinburgh and Oxford, when he became a policy advisor for the Conservative Party.
His first attempt at being elected as an MP, for Sedgefield in 2005, ended in him dropping out of the race after he controversially claimed he wanted a “period of creative destruction in the public services.”
Despite this episode, Kruger was appointed as David Cameron’s chief speech writer in 2006.
Unlike Cameron, Kruger was a Brexit supporter and campaigned to leave the EU in 2016 as a senior fellow at a pro-Brexit think tank.
On his website Kruger said: “I voted Leave in 2016, I supported Boris Johnson's deal to leave the EU and I am confident we can create a positive new relationship with our European neighbours.
“Our responsibility now is to move on from Brexit and concentrate on things that really matter.”
In August 2019 Kruger was selected as Boris Johnson’s political secretary.
14 years after his first attempt, Kruger was elected as the MP for Devizes in 2019 with a majority of 47.1 per cent.
But Kruger has often courted controversy during his parliamentary career.
In 2020 he was forced to apologise for not wearing a mask on a train, when face coverings were mandatory on all public transport.
A year later Kruger was fined when he lost control of his puppy in London’s Richmond Park, leading to the dog chasing a 200-strong herd of deer and causing a stampede.
But the biggest row of his career came last June when he received widespread criticism, including from his mother, for claiming women did not have “an absolute right to bodily autonomy” during a debate on abortion rights.
Kruger will likely cause debate again on Prue and Danny’s Death Road Trip which airs on Thursday, February 16 at 9pm.
Unlike his mother, he is strongly against assisted dying.
Outside of politics, Kruger was awarded an MBE for the work of his youth crime prevention charity Only Connect and has written for the Daily Telegraph.
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