‘Attack’ Starmer is right to tell Elon Musk to get lost

The prime minister has finally rebutted the wild charges made by the unelected foreign billionaire – and, in taking a stand, has exposed another opponent much closer to home, says John Rentoul

In recent days, the prime minister faced a dilemma about how to respond to the barrage of abuse from Elon Musk, troll-in-chief, owner of X (Twitter) and soon-to-be member of the Trump administration. Keir Starmer wanted to rebut the falsehoods being pumped out, but he didn’t want to add to the publicity given to poisonous conspiracy theories.

He made the right decision, coming out swinging this morning against “those that are spreading misinformation as far and wide as possible”.

Starmer said he wasn’t going to “individualise this to Elon Musk or anyone else”, and tried to turn his counterfire onto the Conservative Party – accusing it of echoing the unjustified attack on Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister.

But it is obvious that Musk is the source of the poison, and that Starmer has to make clear, as he said, that “a line has been crossed”.

The prime minister was right to take the inaccurate charges against him head on: to break them down into their constituent parts and rebut them patiently and factually. Thus, Starmer defended his role as director of public prosecutions, in which, far from “covering up” Muslim rape gangs, he led the way in rooting them out – working, as he pointed out, with a Conservative attorney general for three of his five years.

He explained that the truth about Tommy Robinson, whom Musk hails as a political prisoner and a martyr to free speech, is that he went to prison for nearly collapsing a prosecution against a gang. “Those who are cheerleading Tommy Robinson are not interested in justice,” Starmer said. “These are people trying to get some kind of vicarious thrill from street violence that people like Tommy Robinson promote.”

And the prime minister defended Phillips, saying that the Tories’ amplification of Musk’s demand that she should be in prison was putting an MP at risk. He explained that the reason she refused to order a national inquiry into child sexual exploitation is that there has already been one, led by Professor Alexis Jay, which reported in 2022 – and about which the previous Conservative government had done nothing.

He could have gone on to say that it is reasonable to have a debate about whether a new inquiry is needed, focusing on specific issues and places not covered by the Jay report. But that the demand for “an inquiry” promoted by Musk and taken up by the Tories and Reform is code for conspiracy theories about cover-ups that are poisoning our politics and putting MPs’ lives at risk.

Starmer made the right decision to make a stand – and possibly should have done it earlier. As it was, he succeeded in eclipsing his attempt to persuade people that the Labour government was beginning to make progress in turning around the NHS. Before taking journalists’ questions, he commented that most people are more interested in the NHS than in “what’s happening on Twitter”.

The trouble is that people can be interested in more than one thing at a time, and while everyone recognises that the NHS is important, and might even concede that there are some early hopeful signs that Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is starting to make a difference, they are also interested in the soap opera of the world’s richest man pursuing a vendetta against the elected leader of another country.

Musk’s shock-jock tactics are going to gain headlines whether Starmer responds to them or not, so the prime minister might as well seek to set out the facts. And Starmer is right to criticise Kemi Badenoch for echoing the demand for an inquiry when she was a minister in the government that did nothing about the last one.

Starmer may take some hope from the likelihood that Musk, by his obsessive amplification of social media poison, will end up poisoning himself. Labour sources were delighted by Musk’s falling out with Nigel Farage yesterday, mainly because it confirms their hope that Musk is only going to damage himself by trying to interfere in British politics.

It will have emboldened Starmer to go on the attack this morning.

Musk’s response yesterday to one user who criticised him on X (Twitter) was: “f u retard”. Starmer’s response to Musk’s criticism was better and more effective than that.