ELON MUSK

Imogen West-Knights, Slate -  Elon Musk, having spent much of 2024 inveigling himself into a position of power in U.S. politics, has a new target in his sights for this year: Europe. Musk has enjoyed sticking his oar into politics on my side of the Atlantic for a while now. He’s been courting a friendship with Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s far-right prime minister, and he posted on X in support of the leader of the Italian anti-immigration Lega party earlier this year. Before Christmas, Musk posted his views on the annulment of Romania’s presidential election, and in the dying days of 2024, Musk posted on X in support of a far-right German political party with neo-Nazi ties called AfD, then followed with an endorsement in a national paper.

But the last fortnight or so has seen a significant uptick in Musk’s campaign to draw attention to himself in the U.K. specifically. He has had a bee in his bonnet about the U.K.’s Labour government since it came to power and has claimed that “civil war” is inevitable in Britain over prison overcrowding. This week, Musk authored a flurry of new posts about U.K. politics, including calling for the jailed far-right figure Tommy Robinson, a man who has pleaded guilty to multiple criminal convictions, to be freed, and saying that Prime Minister Keir Starmer should be in prison himself. Why? Because Starmer was the director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013, a time when various child sex abuse rings were uncovered in England. Those rings are back in the news this week because there has been some debate over whether a national government–led inquiry into what happened is preferable to a local one. Musk seized on this to push claims Starmer covered up the child abuse. Then, on Sunday, Musk posted that Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s right-wing Reform UK party, and as recently as Sunday morning a vocal ally of Musk, was not fit for the job and that the party needed “a new leader” because Farage refused to back his support for Robinson.

Perhaps, if you’re unfamiliar with U.K. politics, you are reading all of the above and finding it hard to follow. That would be fair enough. But the same is clearly true of Musk. He has waded into complex, long-running elements of political culture here that he does not understand any better than you do. And yet, because of Musk’s new position in the incoming U.S. government, where European leaders might previously have felt comfortable ignoring a slew of misinformed tweets from some rich guy, now they have to engage with them. I daresay they find it infuriating.