Keir Starmer must hold his nerve – it won’t be long until the Musk slips

Donald Trump’s ‘first buddy’ has reignited his on-off feud with the UK government, accusing the prime minister of having failed to tackle historical grooming cases, demanding that Jess Phillips be jailed and a new general election be called. Fortunately, says John Rentoul, most British people will resent this unwanted interference

Keir Starmer should be very afraid. Some of the most toxic forces in British politics are being stirred and amplified by Elon Musk, who has the power of media barons of old – with even less responsibility.

The pinned tweet on Musk’s X account this morning said: “Free Tommy Robinson!” It stays at the top of his page while, underneath, he describes Starmer as the “head of the Crown Prosecution Service when rape gangs were allowed to exploit young girls without facing justice”; and calls for Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, to be in prison.

This is dangerous stuff, boosting anti-democratic conspiracy theories based on myth rather than fact.

Robinson – whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – is in prison because he admitted contempt of court by repeating untrue allegations that a teenage Syrian refugee violently attacked fellow students. Yet Yaxley-Lennon’s tiny band of supporters – now including Musk – insist that he is a political prisoner, jailed for exercising his right to free speech.

Equally, several rape gangs faced justice while Starmer was head of the CPS. While Starmer himself admitted that some cases had not been prosecuted because of a “lack of understanding” of the credibility of the victims, there is no evidence that he was involved in any decisions not to prosecute. On the contrary, he introduced new guidelines on the prosecution of child sexual exploitation to prevent earlier mistakes from being repeated.

Starmer also appointed Nazir Afzal to review previous decisions – he overturned one 2009 decision and nine men were convicted. Afzal said: “The only way we could bring that case was to admit that we had failed these victims when they had first made a complaint in 2008. Keir was 100 per cent behind the decision to publicly admit that we had got it wrong in the past.”

This is the kernel of truth on which the conspiracy theorists build their case. Many of the child victims of sexual exploitation by Muslim men were undoubtedly failed by the justice system – but Starmer was one of many public servants who worked to put those failures right.

Instead of trying to understand a complicated subject, Musk has bought into the paranoid narrative of the British state afraid to protect its underage citizens for fear of being accused of “Islamophobia”.

And he boosts it with the irrationalist memes of the anti-politics right. The latest theme is the demand for a public inquiry into rape gangs, which Phillips, the minister responsible, has turned down for the rather obvious reason that there has already been an inquiry into child sexual abuse, chaired by Professor Alexis Jay, which reported two years ago.

This demand has been taken up by GB News, another new element of the media ecosystem. It was a comment by Liz Truss on a GB News report about Phillips that prompted Musk to reply: “She deserves to be in prison.”

This is a standard theme of extreme language typical of social media and was echoed by Donald Trump with his “Lock her up” chant in the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton. It is also not an exclusively right-wing tendency: it is now completely normal for people who disagreed with Tony Blair’s foreign policy to describe him as a “war criminal”, and to say that he should be in prison.

Musk also repeats newer themes, such as the refusal to accept the results of democratic elections. Yesterday, he posted: “A new election should be called in Britain.”

Fortunately, most British voters will resent this interference in their own affairs – unless they have been totally sucked in to the conspiratorial netherworld where no common facts are accepted. Which is why Truss’s denial of reality is so alarming.

Musk’s backing for Nigel Farage – yesterday he posted, “Vote Reform. It’s the only hope” – could well turn out to be counterproductive for Reform. Farage has tried to keep Reform respectable, saying he wants “nothing to do with Tommy Robinson” and “that lot”.

But what should Starmer do in response to the vicious campaign against him based on half-truths and paranoid myths, which will find fertile ground on the fringes of anti-immigration sentiment? Mostly nothing, apart from calm and factual rebuttal. Musk and Farage will fall out with each other in due course, just as Musk and Trump are unlikely to be working together by the end of 2025. The egos involved are too large and the common interest too small to last.

Starmer should be worried by Musk’s use of his social media platform to try to destabilise him – but he should hold his nerve.