Transcript: Musk and the new political playbook

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Musk and the new political playbook’

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Lucy Fisher
Hello and welcome to Political Fix from the Financial Times with me, Lucy Fisher. There’s a new player in UK politics, the tech billionaire Elon Musk. But what’s behind his sudden fixation on the UK? And are his interventions reframing political discourse not just in Britain but everywhere?

With me in the studio to discuss it all are my FT colleagues and Political Fix regulars Miranda Green. Hi, Miranda.

Miranda Green
Hello, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And Jim Pickard. Hi, Jim.

Jim Pickard
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
We also have down the line the FT’s Westminster correspondent, Anna Gross. Hi, Anna.

Anna Gross
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And the FT’s Washington correspondent, Joe Miller. Hello, Joe.

Joe Miller
Hi, Lucy.

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Lucy Fisher
So obviously, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know who Elon Musk is. He’s the world’s richest man. He is heading into Donald Trump’s administration in under a fortnight now. But Joe, you’ve covered him a lot. Just give us a tiny bit of background and remind us just how powerful he is regarding his corporate interests and his political power.

Joe Miller
Yeah, you’d have to try really hard to avoid him these days, or indeed over the past few years. But just to refresh people on who Elon Musk is, he made his money in the early tech boom with PayPal and then ventured into electric cars with Tesla, essentially popularising the electric car around the world before moving into space exploration with SpaceX; has a business called Starlink, which provides internet via satellite. He also owns an AI business, a company that is invested in boring tunnels underneath big cities, although it hasn’t done much of that yet. And of course, most importantly, he became a political animal a couple of years ago when he bought Twitter, now renamed X, which he controls and uses essentially as a mouthpiece, and which he’s able to interfere in politics, not just in the US but around the globe.

Lucy Fisher
Great. Well, thanks for that recap. So, Elon Musk, let’s talk about the influence he’s having in the UK. Miranda, very interested in your take on what he’s playing at. And there’s lots of avenues for us to discuss in this episode. Let’s start off with the most recent spate of attacks. We know he has form in attacking the UK government and Keir Starmer in particular, but it’s stepped up a gear in recent days with his interventions on grooming gangs.

Miranda Green
So I think the thing that summed it up for me was a fantastic quote that one of our colleagues on the reporting team got from an expert in social media, someone who used to work in Twitter when it was Twitter, saying, you know, he’s the first person in history to fall down the rabbit hole of his own social media site because essentially, it turns out, as our colleagues have reported, that he’s been looking at a few accounts giving a very distorted picture of something that is a serious scandal in the UK, but apportioning blame, wrongly intervening in the debate over what should happen next, and catapulting a very dark issue, the organised sexual abuse and exploitation of young people and children right up to the very top of the political agenda. Everything else shoved out of the way.

I think it’s extraordinary really, because it just shows you that there are things now which are more powerful, really, than national governments. And national governments are kind of at the mercy of, you know, some extraordinarily rich person who has bought a platform that he now wants to use for political interventions.

I mean, there’s clearly something slightly odd going on with the time change with America and the sort of British content that he’s picking up. But the end result of that is, you know, for example, Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, being attacked by Elon Musk as an enabler of mass rape. I mean, it’s really quite extraordinary and causing her to be in fear for her own safety. And as it happens, Jess Phillips is a life-long campaigner for ending violence against women and girls and it’s a completely wrong accusation.

So, you know, we saw some of this, the riots in the summer, when he, Musk, tweeted that civil war is inevitable in the UK. It was his tweet. Again, a very partial understanding, limited and unsophisticated understanding of something that is nonetheless an actual social problem in the UK. This is not gonna be the last time, in my view.

Lucy Fisher
And Jim, as Miranda makes clear, a lot of what he is saying, Musk, about the grooming scandal is incorrect. But nonetheless, it has catapulted this issue into the headlines again. And we’ve all just done a lot of reflecting over the festive period. We did our episode last week of, you know, look ahead to 2025. I don’t think anyone really saw it coming down the line that the grooming scandal would be back. So just remind us a bit about the grooming scandal itself, some of the facts around that, the history of it and what Musk has been saying.

Jim Pickard
Yeah. So I think the thing that’s fascinating about this — and this is going with what Miranda just said — is the power of this one man in control of a social network and his ability to undermine a democratically elected government and openly seek to basically overthrow it. And he was asking, should America basically invade Britain and oust Keir Starmer? It’s the kind of thing you expect to see in a James Bond movie or something like that.

And the thing that’s very fascinating is that he has the power now to control our political and media discourse to the extent that, you know, had he suddenly become fascinated with, let’s say, abuse by the Church of England, we would now be writing thousand-word analyses every other day about things that the Church of England. How on earth were we trusting, you know, men of the cloth, religious figures to be abusing children over the decades?

Instead, he’s alighted on this particular scandal of the grooming gangs, which is something that came to light slowly through the 2000s. There were isolated cases in certain towns of these gangs, many of which turned out to be UK-Pakistani origin men who were abusing particularly white girls aged between about 12 and 15. And this came to light firstly as the result of work by a Labour MP called Ann Cryer, who was MP for Keighley. So she was the first person to uncover that this was a particular problem. And then the person who brought it to national attention, for all the criticism we’re hearing of the mainstream media, was a Times journalist called Andrew Norfolk with the backing of his editor James Harding, who put it on the front page and basically got Andrew Norfolk to work on nothing else for four years from 2011 through to 2015; brought this to national attention and it turned out to be in towns particularly across South Yorkshire in the north, Oldham, Bradford, Huddersfield, Rochdale. Rotherham was one of the big ones, but also, you know, Bristol, Oxford, Telford. So it wasn’t even geographically isolated.

And there’s been a lot of soul-searching since about why particularly the police were slow to intervene on this. And councils were also slow. There have been 10 inquiries into this. And one of the things that’s come out repeatedly from some of these inquiries is that the police and councils were worried about intervening because they didn’t want to look racist.

Lucy Fisher
Well, Anna, I’m really interested in your take here on why you think Musk is alighting on this. And of course, none of us are inside his head. But on the one hand, this is an issue that has been weaponised by the far right, who want to draw particular emphasis to the racial element. And as Jim pointed out, it is factually correct to say that most of the perpetrators of this pattern of grooming and rape were men of Pakistani heritage.

On the other hand, the refusal to sort of want to be labelled racist and concerns about community relations are part of the reason that the scandal took so long to uncover. Do you think that Musk has a genuine, authentic concern about the victims here, or is he sort of wanting to play into a narrative pushed by the far right for more political ends, do you think?

Anna Gross
I think it’s both of those things. I think it’s possible that he feels viscerally, genuinely shocked and appalled by what he’s reading about and what is being shown to him on his feed a lot of the time, and we will come on to talking a bit more about the algorithms.

But as Jim pointed out, it’s interesting that he is still selecting the things that he cares about. So, you know, and the things that he’s talking about kind of endlessly on his platform. You know, he does a lot of business in the Middle East, in Saudi Arabia. He’s not talking about the human rights abuses. He’s not talking about treatment of women in those countries, nor is he talking about the lack of kind of freedom of expression in those places. He’s very, very, very focused on Europe and the US and the UK. So he’s got this kind of fixation with the west.

And I think one important way of thinking about it is that he’s part of this kind of milieu of people across Europe and the US that have this declinist world view. They think that the west is in sort of terminal decline. You know, there’s a lot of people that call themselves kind of philosophers, thinkers, even intellectuals writing books about how mass migration, globalisation has had an incredibly negative impact on the world and this kind of woke thinking — what some refer to as the woke mind virus — has prevented people from being able to speak out about various problems with society.

For that reason, I think it’s possible that he can both be actually appalled by the specifics of what he’s reading about, but also be thinking about it as part of this kind of wider philosophical movement that he subscribes to.

Miranda Green
Don’t you think, though, Anna, that it’s also part of the pattern, for example, of him deciding to endorse the AfD in Germany? And, you know, that’s not sort of aligned to any particular scandal along these lines in mainland Europe.

It’s also to do with this idea of, you know, who can save us? I’m a champion of the right. And that, I think, is really interesting the way it plays into domestic politics here in the UK, because of then who he decides to endorse here, who he might fund. The idea that he was very, very close to Nigel Farage for a while and now has publicly declined to because of Farage’s attempts to keep the Reform party a respectable party of the right and to disown the far right. It’s a kind of complex world where he wants to be influential in domestic politics in western European countries, right?

Jim Pickard
I think it’s also very much a cipher for a world where the influence of the old-fashioned media is declining and the influence of the new social media is increasing. And the danger for this — and of course, I will say this as an established journalist — is that firstly, voices which take a very simplistic view of the world get more traction on social media. Secondly, there’s no obligation to give people a right to reply or give a relatively balanced point of view.

And when people talk about Elon Musk being basically radicalised by his own algorithms, he is presumably getting a feed where the more he shows an interest in far-right material or anti-immigration material, he’s getting fed more and more of it. And it does feel an awful lot as if he’s only just stumbled on the grooming gang scandal and he thinks it’s something that needs to be resolved, needs to be tackled now. It’s almost like he’s ignoring the fact that hundreds of people have already been sent to jail. Yes, the police acted slowly. A lot of politicians acted too slowly on this. But, you know, we’ve been through the process of sending people to prison for this. And, yes, there are attempts to now prevent it happening currently and prevent it happening in the future.

But he’s just stumbling into it with these very, very strong opinions. The danger for those of us who like our opinions relatively balanced is that he is not getting his material from very balanced or very deep sources. I can’t imagine for a second that he’s read any of these 10 reports by the experts in this problem.

Lucy Fisher
Well, Joe, that’s a great moment to talk about your scoop this week about how he has, in the words of one former senior Twitter executive, been radicalised by his own algorithm. You’ve had a look at how his recent obsession with UK politics is being fuelled by quite a small group of popular accounts on his own social media platform X.

Joe Miller
Yes, I think this really goes to show how we can overanalyse some of his positions and the reasons for Elon Musk’s obsession with, say, Germany or the UK. And it might be as simple as the fact that he bought Twitter, renamed it X, essentially changed the algorithm so that only people, or primarily people who pay to be verified, are shown in what’s called the for you page, which is essentially an algorithmically curated feed of people you don’t necessarily follow as a user but which the algorithm thinks you might be interested in. And Elon Musk is not immune to this himself when he goes on to his X app. What he will see is essentially posts by a handful of accounts which have usually roughly a million or more followers. And some of these accounts — you know, I’ve spoken to some of the people behind it — literally exist to feed off of things that Elon Musk is posting about or other far-right figures. And he just keeps seeing this.

And when the grooming gang scandal for various reasons started appearing in the news again late last year, these accounts seized on that. They started, you know, using ever more vitriolic language, calling this, you know, a terrible scandal and blaming various people, including Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips, turning a blind eye to it. And this is just what he saw. And as far as we can tell from our reporting, he’s not going outside of X to verify any of these claims. He’s not examining any of the sources because these posts don’t come with links to sources, because one of the things that X has done is deprioritise posts that include links.

And so it’s this essentially negative feedback loop that he has created and then become a victim of himself. And I think the evidence of all of this is that you can see — and this is why I think there is a danger of overanalysing what Elon’s obsessions are — is that you can see as soon as the news agenda moves on, like today with the wildfires, he’s suddenly obsessed with something else. So he hasn’t got any staying power when it comes to the things he’s supposedly prioritised. You know, you haven’t heard him talk about wanting to slash bureaucracy in Washington for quite a few weeks now, which was an enormous obsession after Trump got elected in November.

So, yeah, I think it’s, again, amazing as it may seem, the richest man in the world and perhaps the most influential man is being educated by a series of viral posts designed to send him off into a frenzy.

Lucy Fisher
Anna, what about some of the other theories doing the rounds about why he has this particular interest in the UK? I mean, some people highlight that he views himself through this sort of British lens. His grandmother came from the UK. Other people have a sort of quite naughty theory that he bears a grudge against Starmer on the basis of a campaign group set up by Morgan McSweeney, one of his key aides.

Anna Gross
Yeah, I think it’s possibly a mixture of a variety of different things. I think he clearly has a kind of big chip on his shoulder about the kind of liberal establishment orthodoxy that he sees, he feels has kind of invaded Europe and taken over there.

Also, you know, his ex-wife was British. He spent quite a lot of time in England. As you said, his grandma was British. He brought that up this week, as if clearly aware that so many people were opining on why he’s taken such a big interest.

I also think that his financial interests do play a bit of a part. I watched an interview this week that he gave and he was saying, you know, quite categorically, this is not about money. This is not about power.

But actually his interest in British politics picked up massively in July around the time of the riots. And one of the things that he was particularly aggrieved about was the fact that people were being convicted, were being arrested for posts that they were doing on X and Facebook and other social media platforms. And I think he’s more broadly concerned about a crackdown in Britain and in Europe on big tech companies. And X is already feeling a bit of that. And it’s gonna feel even more when the Online Safety Act comes into full force over the next year.

So I think that, you know, I don’t think that’s the main driving factor, but I think there’s an element of that in there as well. And it’s quite hard to parse some of these different things apart.

And just picking up on one of the things that Joe said in his excellent piece about how he’s kind of been radicalised by his own platform. One of the things that I find quite interesting is because I, like probably all of us, have been watching more Elon Musk content than I would have ever thought I would over the past week. And he’s so angry and he’s so violent in his language when he’s writing and when he’s tweeting and retweeting. And then when you watch clips of interviews he’s giving often on the same subjects, he’s actually like, very mellow and quite softly spoken and actually sounds quite reasonable.

And I feel like it’s such a glaring example of that kind of keyboard warrior dynamic where he’s become that distant, that not having to actually speak to someone face to face allows you to kind of lose all empathy or compassion.

Lucy Fisher
I think that’s a really interesting point. It certainly seems like his salvos have become increasingly hyperbolic in their rhetoric and increasingly frenetic in terms of pace. Miranda.

Miranda Green
Well, the thing is, you know, the phenomenon of Musk and what on earth is going on in his mind is one thing and his motivations. But I think for our politics in the UK, this is the significant thing. Perhaps, you know, as Joe suggested, you know, he’s now moved on to the California wildfires for the next few days. But nevertheless, the size of the grenade that he’s chucked into the middle of the House of Commons, to adopt violent language of my own, which I probably shouldn’t, is considerable, right? And then Starmer’s government is left picking up a really considerable mess.

And there are dilemmas for Kemi Badenoch, leader of the opposition. You know, what does she do now? You know, Musk’s publicly dumped his alliance with Farage but still seems to have picked Reform UK as a vehicle that he would like to see succeed on the right because he thinks the Conservatives are not defending western civilisation in the way that he defines the need for that sort of culture war. And Badenoch’s not distancing herself. So, you know, the dynamic is set by him even as he moves on.

Lucy Fisher
And is it going further than that? I mean, what’s your assessment of whether the Tories and Reform are trying to curry favour with him by echoing his call for a national inquiry into grooming gangs?

Miranda Green
Oh, I think definitely, this idea was picked up and run with by the Conservative party. You know, I mean, it’s interesting actually. I would say that Starmer’s ministerial team are no longer just setting their face against another inquiry because, you know, again, I feel that this discussion can get a little bit divorced from the actual substance of what’s happened here.

It seems to me there are failings in the UK which this sort of scandal does actually draw attention to. And it really does behove us to think about them, even if you compare it to, for example, something like the Post Office Horizon scandal. It’s quite true in that case as well, that the mainstream media, of which we were a part, were reporting on it, investigating it, putting a lot of resources into it. The BBC did a drama about the Rotherham child abuse grooming gangs. So it’s not as if it’s been ignored at all in any way by the mainstream media, but it takes something to catapult it back up the agenda for action to be taken.

And I think that’s it’s that feeling of injustice or government and the machine, the official machine failing to protect the vulnerable, which is a genuine anger that surfaces when these scandals are sort of catapulted, for whatever reason, back up the agenda. And it does draw attention to the lack of follow through. Why were so many inquiries done? And yet Alexis Jay’s recommendations, of which there were 20, not enacted, right? So these are questions we should actually be challenging ourselves with.

Lucy Fisher
I think that’s absolutely right. And Jim, you’ve been looking in real depth at the Alexis Jay report. This is the seven-year inquiry that concluded in 2022 into the wider issue of child sex abuse, because it feels like one of the key arguments flung by either side of the aisle in the House of Commons this week has been what the rightwing party saying we need a national inquiry, and Keir Starmer and his allies saying we’ve had a national inquiry. Have we had an inquiry into grooming or not?

Jim Pickard
Exactly. So there was a seven-year inquiry led by Alexis Jay into the issue of child sex abuse. It cost nearly £200mn. It landed with these 20 big recommendations. The problem was that it landed in the month when Liz Truss’s administration was imploding in late 2022. And that’s one reason it didn’t make as big headlines as it might have otherwise done.

Now, the awkwardness of this for Kemi Badenoch is that the Conservatives, as Miranda just said, did not implement any of those 20 recommendations. Now, we’ve done a story this week in which we revealed that one of the Jay recommendations, which was setting up a big redress scheme to pay financial compensation to thousands and thousands of victims of sexual abuse from decades, it would cost this huge amount of money. So perhaps unsurprising that the Conservatives ducked it ahead of the election, but it’s a very awkward question for them.

Now, the criticism of the Jay inquiry, for those on the right of British politics, is that it didn’t make enough of the particularly Pakistani grooming gangs in these northern towns. And I had to skim through it today. And I searched for various words. So the words grooming gangs, not mentioned. The word Pakistani, not mentioned. The word Catholic comes up 124 times. The word Church of England comes up 49 times. And it very specifically only looks at six towns and it says, you know, they chose not to look at the ones like Rotherham and Oldham, which had already been examined in great detail.

But there’s this really interesting passage in there where Jay or her committee basically write that the ethnicity of the victims and the alleged perpetrators was rarely recorded. You know, the data was not easily available. There were widespread failures to record data. And so people on the right of British politics are saying this is a cop out because we know from elsewhere that most of these gangs in this particular subset of sex abuse were basically Asian Muslims.

Now, if you don’t believe me, who said in the 2013 report into the Rotherham scandal written by the same Alexis Jay where 1,400 children were abused? In that report, she wrote by far the majority of the perpetrators were described as Asian by victims. The majority of then perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage. So certainly in the case of that one specific town, she didn’t mince her words, but somehow, 10 years later, she’s decided to possibly fudge it.

Now, the issue you have when you get into this race issue is would Jay’s recommendations have been any different had she focused more intensely on that? I mean, possibly not. You might think from a very rightwing perspective, a lot of people are saying, well, this is proof that we should cut immigration. This is where it gets incredibly political because they are feeding it into a whole question of, you know, the people from Pakistan, for example, have, inverted commas, words of Robert Jenrick, shadow justice secretary, medieval attitudes towards women. Now, obviously, that is abhorrent to a lot of people in Britain, particularly on the left and that is the very vicious political debate that we now find ourselves in.

Lucy Fisher
That’s really well-explained, so thank you. And I think another key talking point in this whole issue has been around the class and ethnicity of the children, the girls who were abused by the grooming gangs. They were predominantly white and working class, many of them from the kind of lowest end of the socio-economic spectrum and therefore maybe not taken as seriously by the authorities.

Miranda Green
Well, you know, by the police. I have to say there’s one particular detail which stays with me from what I’ve read that is so horrendous, about a case where they found a girl sort of semi-naked, drunk, with a group of men. The police arrested the girl and charged her with being drunk and disorderly. So what is the attitude there of the police seeing these young girls as essentially kind of worthless?

Jim Pickard
There’s another extraordinary one where there’s a police, when Andrew Norfolk does his investigation, the police launched an inquiry into who leaked information to the journalist.

Miranda Green
Yeah, absolutely. I remember that very well, actually, at the time. And Andrew Norfolk has been very interesting, going back over who he thought responded well to his investigation. And actually, he interestingly praised Keir Starmer this week for changes that he made when he was DPP to address the sort of widespread abuse of women and girls.

But I think, you know, once again, I think there is actually a societal challenge here at the base of this story. And we do need to face up to it, whether that’s another inquiry of the sort that the Conservative party is now calling for on this specific sort of abuse or just going back through all of these. How many do you say there have been, Jim, 12 or 14 inquiries over the years?

Jim Pickard
I think there have been 10 various inquiries.

Miranda Green
Go back through them all in a forensic way., see what the Venn diagram of recommendations are there and act on them. Because I was reading myself one done by the Children’s Commissioner before the Jay report, bringing up all the same patterns of behaviour, particularly for awfully vulnerable children — for instance, those in care homes. This is really not something we should tolerate.

Lucy Fisher
Well, I don’t think this is an issue that’s going away any time soon. And as you pointed out earlier, Miranda, Labour’s language around the possibility of another inquiry seems to have shifted. It feels like they’re keeping the door open to that.

Joe, just to come back to the sort of centrality of Musk and why we’re all talking about it now, I’ve been thinking about the way in which his criticism, some would say trolling, of the UK government is at the moment very much an online activity. What do you think the chances are of that hostility spilling offline? I mean, is it realistic or is it fanciful to think he could toy with turning off Starlink over the UK or using his wealth or corporate interests in any other retaliatory way?

Joe Miller
I think there’s a very high possibility of that. And I think that when we analyse Elon Musk’s interests in the UK generally and why he’s latched on to these grooming gangs, I think we can underplay the role of Keir Starmer in all of this and, you know, trying to divine Elon Musk’s motives is probably a fool’s errand.

But, you know, if you talk to many of the people who Anna mentioned earlier, the so-called rightwing thinkers who seem to be influencing him, they really despise Keir Starmer for a very simple reason, which is that next year, when Donald Trump is in power, Keir Starmer may be the only progressive — or what they would call in the US liberal — leader of a major economy anywhere around the world.

They have pretty much won, and they certainly won in the US and, you know, far right parties on the ascendancy in France, in Germany, you name it. And so Keir Starmer is this sort of thorn in the side of this movement and he could be around until 2029.

And you can really see this sort of gathering hatred and animosity towards Starmer in particular because they know they can’t get rid of him and that’s why, you know, it’s so important, you know, Anna’s scoop this morning on the fact that Musk is looking at ways to try and get rid of Starmer and dislodge him before that election. And, you know, who knows what he could resort to.

He doesn’t have that many economic interests in the UK directly, but of course he’s incredibly influential on many industries. He has lots of friends in high places now. He has the ear of Donald Trump. If he wanted to, as he has joked, you know, impose sanctions on the UK, should we take that seriously? Perhaps so.

Lucy Fisher
Well, Anna, tell us a bit more about your extraordinary scoop on Musk privately discussing with allies this idea of trying to oust Starmer from office.

Anna Gross
Yeah, well, I mean, as we have been talking about over the past four, five days, he’s been posting quite actively about wanting to get rid of Starmer. But with him, it’s always . . . There’s always a sort of a lack of clarity over whether it’s just him kind of trolling, as you said. He loves being provocative. He likes taking things to the extreme, particularly online and particularly on X.

But some of his political allies say that he’s had conversations with them where he’s actually been probing how it might be possible to remove Starmer from power — kind of probing around what is the UK electoral system, what are the opportunities to get rid of him with the idea that the next general election isn’t gonna be till 2029, 2030. That’s a long way away. You know, what can we do in the meantime?

And he’s obviously very interested in Reform as a vehicle because it is the political party in the UK that’s most closely aligned to his worldview. As we’ve discussed, he seems to have taken a quite sharp disliking to Nigel Farage over the weekend because he didn’t agree with some of the positions that Musk was taking. But from the conversations he’s having, it does seem as though he’s still seeing Reform as the most credible vehicle. I think it gives an indication that there is serious intent there.

There is a serious desire to unsettle British politics and particularly to remove, as Joe said, one of the last bastions of a kind of centre-left politics.

Jim Pickard
I much preferred it when it was British millionaires trying to choose our prime ministers (laughter) in the form of Tory donors.

Lucy Fisher
Jim, what can or should the UK be doing to counter Musk? We’ve had Starmer’s intervention at the start of this week, essentially calling out his lies and misinformation, but also making clear he doesn’t want really to individualise it. Some of Starmer’s allies in government, you know, will say he doesn’t wanna give more oxygen to Musk’s interventions.

And is it being taken seriously in Britain as it seems to be in France and Germany, where it feels like there’s a bit more willingness for their governments to take action and indeed the EU being urged to take measures?

Jim Pickard
So the Starmer position ever since the Donald Trump election victory has basically been relatively supine or perhaps called, depending on your point of view, which is, you know, we have to do business with America, they are our allies in trade terms and diplomatic and military terms, and therefore, what is the point of putting Donald Trump’s nose out of joint?

And I think the approach was fairly similar to Elon Musk’s outbursts up into the point over the weekend where he was personally singling out Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, in the most vicious way and leaving her in fear of her safety.

And so when he pops up on Monday morning, we’re in this hospital down in Surrey, he was meant to be talking, making announcements about health, which he did. But of course, when the media questions came, they were all about Elon Musk and he’d pre-prepared a statement. He didn’t mention Musk by name, but he was very clear that he wants to draw a line in the sand. But beyond that, they don’t know what the answer is. Like all the rest of us, they find themselves perplexed and discombobulated by this kind of changing political media, social media world.

I asked Downing Street earlier this week, are they gonna start putting announcements and are ministers gonna start gravitating towards alternative social media platforms such as Bluesky, which I can heartily recommend. I don’t have any financial interest in them, but I’m spending a lot more time there. (Laughter) But he just looked a bit kind of, you know, confused by my question. I don’t think they . . . They didn’t seem to put an awful lot of thought into it.

I think leaving what is still the global town square of internet discourse, I think leaving in the way that the Guardian did is probably not ideal, especially for governments. But perhaps they could think about using other sites as well, given that the owner wants to destroy them and that kind of thing?

Lucy Fisher
Miranda.

Miranda Green
Well, you know, I thought Robert Shrimsley — absent friends, you know, I raise my water glass to him — wrote a very interesting column on it this week, actually, the extent to which this draws attention to the fact that the political terrain has been transformed by the new media.

And, you know, the old MO just doesn’t work any more, you know, and you have to be alive to things that can blow up really fast. You even probably as a government, in order to be able to govern without being blown off course like this, probably need to anticipate where these unexploded bombs might be.

You know, what are all the inquiries that have been left on a shelf? That is what I would be doing if I was in Number 10. Go back and look at the conclusions by experts covering scandals and being asked to look into scandals and find out what’s not been done and not followed up.

Jim Pickard
I think it’s also a taster of the fact that Donald Trump, as in his second presidency, is gonna be dropping word bombs on the UK administration all the time and it’s gonna be incredibly confusing for Starmer’s administration.

Lucy Fisher
Well, I think on that, Joe, we should give the final word to you and your take on what will happen when Donald Trump is actually sworn into office in less than a fortnight now. Is he really gonna allow Elon Musk to carry on like this? Will he tolerate it, do you think?

Joe Miller
I just want to say a word quickly on what Miranda was just saying over there, which is that there may be entirely honourable reasons for revisiting the inquiries. And, you know, I defer to greater minds in British politics and all of that.

But I think what’s very interesting about Musk and the dilemma that Starmer will find himself in and governments in Germany and elsewhere is that if they think that doing something like that will appease Musk or any exculpatory evidence about Starmer’s involvement as, you know, director of public prosecutions, etc, will lead him to stand down, I don’t think there’s any evidence that would work at all. So there’s the merits of the issue and what needs to be done.

And then there’s how Elon Musk operates, which is essentially as a troll trying to kind of, you know, push his agenda, whatever that may be, in any given week.

To go to your question about what would happen when Trump takes office, well, there’s already reporting coming out of Mar-a-Lago that Musk has sort of overstayed his welcome somewhat.

And I think you’ll notice that Donald Trump, who is not shy when it comes to attacking US allies around the world, has not joined really in this attack on Starmer or picked up this issue when it comes to grooming gangs. And he kind of has chosen other avenues of attack and isn’t really following Elon Musk’s lead, which I think is very, very telling.

And also, I think we can overstate how influential Elon Musk has been since November. He hasn’t gotten his way on some very important issues. You know, he pushed for Rick Scott to be the Senate majority leader and he lost on that. He didn’t want Scott Bessent to be Treasury secretary. He lost on that. So, you know, we may very, very soon see this so-called bromance begin to fracture, if not end. And I think, you know, when it comes to planning how to deal with Donald Trump and Elon Musk, people would do well to bear that in mind.

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Lucy Fisher
Well, we’ve just got time left for Political Fix stock picks. Anna, who are you buying or selling this week?

Anna Gross
I am going to sell Rachel Reeves. I’m sure I have quite a lot of her in my portfolio, I must do. But it’s a pretty grim time for her with . . . There’s been a sell-off in the bond market, gilt yields are up. And it’s looking as though that’s gonna put intense pressure on her during the spending review that’s coming in the spring. It’s gonna mean that she’s pushing for government departments to reduce their budgets even more. And I think that’s gonna make her unpopular in government. The general economic picture is making her relatively unpopular outside of government. So, yeah, unfortunately for her, it’s not a good time.

Lucy Fisher
Miranda.

Miranda Green
Well, I’m afraid I’m gonna jump on the sell bandwagon here and I’m gonna be selling education secretary Bridget Phillipson because she has decided — not particularly for cost-cutting reasons, interestingly, so her motivations are under the spotlight a bit — to take on the secondary school reform trend of the last 30 years and start to unpick the freedoms of academy schools, for example, in various ways that could actually hurt, perversely, the opportunity agenda in some deprived areas.

For example, my, you know, go-to example is that if you can’t vary the pay of teachers to recruit them into schools in difficult areas, well, how are you gonna tempt them in? Some of the things she’s pushing through in the schools bill that’s in parliament at the moment are raising a lot of not just eyebrows but also concern in the school reform world. So I think that’s one to watch, whether she makes enemies too early on when she needs allies.

Lucy Fisher
Jim.

Jim Pickard
I’m gonna buy Jess Phillips because there are quite a few Labour ministers who wouldn’t say boo to a goose and who are quite sort of insipid, verbal performers. Jess Phillips is not one of them. She is someone who is very, very articulate. She has a very strong track record in her field of basically, you know, defending women has been something that’s driven her political career for a very long time. And she’s now the safeguarding minister.

And I think, although she looked like she was reeling from that kind of attack out of nowhere from Elon Musk, you could sort of see her coming back with some quite punchy interviews. There was one I saw where she suggested that the one thing Elon Musk had achieved was that he’d brought to the attention of Kemi Badenoch, seemingly for the very first time, the existence of these grooming gangs.

Lucy Fisher
She was quite sassy too when she told him to crack on with getting to Mars, wasn’t she? (Laughter)

Jim Pickard
Lucy, what’s your choice?

Lucy Fisher
I’m going to buy Jonathan Powell, Keir Starmer’s national security adviser, former chief of staff to Tony Blair in Downing Street. And I’ve just been picking up and indeed a report on a lot of optimism, confidence in the UK government that they’re gonna get this Chagos Islands deal with Mauritius over the line. Jonathan Powell was the author of that.

He took a trip to the US last month with Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff. They met a lot of Trump’s allies. And he’s just building a big power base. And given that defence, Nato, conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine are gonna be a key topic of discussion once Trump comes in, I think his empire is only gonna grow.

Joe, who are you buying or selling?

Joe Miller
Well, if you’ll allow me a slightly off-the-wall pick, I will buy someone listeners may not have heard of, probably haven’t heard of. His name is Stefan Tompson, and he is the head of a Twitter/X account called Visegrád24, which has well over a million followers and crucially, our data team found, is the account with which Elon Musk has interacted with most out of all accounts on X over British politics and the grooming gangs issue. And this is a guy who is British-born, British-educated, lives between Warsaw and South Africa, employs roughly 16 people.

And the entire raison d'être of this account now and this site is to feed the algorithm and by extension, to feed Elon Musk. And so his power and the power of this dozen or so people who are essentially posting half-verified or inaccurate information on X in several times a day I think is not to be underestimated, so we’re regrettably buying Stefan Tompson.

Lucy Fisher
Well, that’s all we’ve got time for this week. Jim Pickard, Miranda Green, Anna Gross and Joe Miller, thanks for joining.

Miranda Green
Thank you.

Jim Pickard
Thanks, Lucy.

Anna Gross
Thanks, Lucy.

Joe Miller
Thank you.

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Lucy Fisher
And that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. I’ve put links to subjects discussed in this episode in the show notes. Do check them out. They’re articles that we’ve made free for Political Fix listeners. There’s also a link there to Stephen’s award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You’ll get 30 days free. And don’t forget to subscribe to the show.

Plus, please do leave a review or a star rating if you have time. It really helps us spread the word. I’ll also put in links to our accounts on Bluesky, given that Jim gave it a plug and I can say he’s excellent to follow on the platform.

Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Lulu Smyth. Manuel Saragosa is the executive producer. Original music by Breen Turner and mixed by Simon Panayi. Andrew Georgiades and Rod Fitzgerald are the broadcast engineers. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio.

We’ll meet again here next week.

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