Never mind Badenoch and Farage – Starmer’s real task is dealing with Trump and Musk

It’s not just Starmer’s premiership at stake here. If the president-elect and his billionaire pal become a bigger threat than they already are, UK democracy may also be at their mercy, writes John Rentoul

One thing that Keir Starmer should not do, as he seeks to manage the relationship with the incoming president of the United States, is leak private details of his phone calls with him.

So it is unlikely that the prime minister was responsible for telling The Times that Donald Trump “veered off on a series of tangents” in their conversation on 18 December. The president-elect said that so many birds were being killed flying into wind turbines in the US that the coyotes were growing fat. If Starmer, or anyone acting on his behalf, did leak it, it could prove quite the misstep.

This is harmless stuff by Trump’s standards, reflecting his known antipathy to “windmills”, as he called them, in a public post on Truth Social yesterday. But the breach of confidence will make it harder for Starmer to engage with the unpredictable fireball coming his way.

So far I have been relatively optimistic on Starmer’s behalf about the challenge ahead. Trump’s threat of tariffs is mostly bluster, because he understands basic economics better than his voters do and knows that duties would stoke inflation at home. As he has just won an election thanks partly to rising prices, he is unlikely to take that risk.

At the same time, Elon Musk’s attempts to interfere in British politics are likely to be counterproductive. Most British voters will react negatively to the world’s richest man – who is unpopular here and who supports an unpopular president-elect – telling them that they should have another election because he didn’t like the result of the last one.

My view was that it would be uncomfortable for Starmer to endure the barrage of ideological hostility from the Trump-Musk duumvirate, but that the British public would be unmoved.

But I cannot be sure. The damage done to British politics by the boosting of conspiracy theories could be lasting. It didn’t happen last time Trump was president because the falsehoods he promoted were US-specific: that Barack Obama was foreign-born; that his crowds were huge; that the 2020 election was stolen.

This time, though, he has Musk by his side, pursuing what seems to be a personal feud with Starmer and using his social media platform to amplify it.

The most toxic allegation so far is that the prime minister is part of a “cover up” of Muslim rape gangs in northern England. The claim is not that terrible things happened, which is true, but that Starmer as head of the Crown Prosecution Service at the time was part of a conspiracy to allow them to do so, which is untrue. Starmer was part of the solution, improving the way such cases were handled, reopening old cases and sending hundreds of offenders to prison.

Unfortunately, the mindless demand for an inquiry – there was one into child sexual abuse carried out by Professor Alexis Jay two years ago – has been taken up by Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch. The Conservative leader said: “Trials have taken place all over the country in recent years but no one in authority has joined the dots.”

That “join the dots” phrase is a staple of conspiracy theorists: it sends a terrible signal to every paranoid fantasist who thinks they can see patterns in events that normal “sheeple” cannot.

In the end, this unleashing of irrationalism may do more damage to Badenoch and Farage than to Starmer, but it cannot do our politics any good. Farage was forced yesterday to distance himself from some of what Musk, his new best friend, has been saying – specifically over his support for Tommy Robinson. But even without Musk’s support for Robinson and the German AfD, Farage’s closeness to him and to Trump puts a low ceiling on the level of support that Reform can hope to attract from British voters.

So, Starmer may survive the onslaught from his unpopular enemies, which may succeed only in dividing and discrediting further his opponents at home. But there may be a price to pay in the quality of our political debate. The howl-round of the right-wing echo chamber could drown out moderate voices, as Musk reposts a comment by Liz Truss on a report by GB News, and the mainstream media report it because he is the richest man in the world advising the most powerful one.

There is something more important than Starmer’s premiership at stake here.