Keir Starmer has a new home; our Prime Minister appears to have taken up residence in the mind of Elon Musk, whose late-night posts on X about Britain and its government grow increasingly frequent – and deranged. Musk, who claimed in the summer that civil war was “inevitable” in Britain, wrote on 24 November that the “people of Britain have had enough of a tyrannical police state” – as he shared a post about an online petition calling, pointlessly, for a general election. The post he shared was by a blogger called Peter Sweden, real name Peter Imanuelsen.
An investigation in 2017 by anti-racism group Hope Not Hate alleged Imanuelsen had previously posted Holocaust denial on Twitter, with one tweet claiming “Hitler had some good points”. He was also reported to have tweeted: “The claim that six million jews were gassed seem highly unprobable [sic].” Sweden later said he had abandoned some of his earlier views.
On the same day that Musk promoted Imanuelsen’s recent post about Britain becoming a police state, he also shared a graph which showed a sharp decline in Starmer’s popularity. The following day, he posted “support the farmers”, though I suspect he would struggle to find Cumbria on a map. He also shared a report, seemingly based on an old article by Douglas Murray, that implied the new British government believes that reading Lord of the Rings and Nineteen Eighty-Four could lead people into right-wing extremism – which has obviously never been the case.
Why would the world’s richest man give a flying X about what’s going on in the UK? Isn’t he busy finding $2trn in savings for the US government? Perhaps he’s concerned a Labour government may hold social media platforms to account for their content. Maybe he is trying to out-Trump Trump. Or maybe it’s just that Starmer stood up to him. None of this is Starmer’s problem, but what is a problem is the degree to which Musk’s misinformation and meddling bleeds through to the mainstream British media.
GB News and Mail Online were among many who quickly reported on Musk’s posts about the general election poll. Radio talk shows followed. Before you knew it, Sky News and a host of other reputable news operators were running with: “Starmer rules out another general election after petition reaches two million signatures.” Would the poll have received as much attention without Musk’s involvement? Perhaps. But probably not.
Only one thing will deflect the onslaught Starmer faces, and that’s British people feeling better. In the meantime, he can take some comfort in being the only global leader literally keeping the world’s richest man awake at night.
Meanwhile, Musk’s new boss, Donald Trump, has been planning his presidential media strategy. Karoline Leavitt, 27, is to be White House Press Secretary and the Washington press gallery will reportedly be expanded to include podcasters, influencers and other non-mainstream media.
It certainly looks as if relations will be getting off to a flying start after Leavitt told her local news site: “There is a hostile press that covers the president dishonestly, and they need to be held accountable.”
At woke warrior TV station GB News, bosses have shelled out £100,000 getting rid of gender-neutral toilets. The Mirror’s Mikey Smith revealed unisex cubicles in the company’s rented Paddington studio have been ditched, as have 40 staff in a cost-cutting project launched after the business posted an operating loss of £42.4m last year. As GB News’s editorial director, Michael Booker, wrote at the weekend: “We are the fearless champion of Britain – its voices and its values.” And its toilets.
On 4 December – exactly 233 years since the Observer was first published – staff at the Sunday title and Guardian will walk out on strike. The 48-hour action comes as the papers’ owner, the Scott Trust, has failed to make a final decision on its proposal to sell the Observer to the digital start-up Tortoise Media. Apparently a “few outstanding points” are still to be decided.
The trust, which has £1.3bn in assets, was also due to discuss whether it should put more funding into the deal to reassure staff, although it seems unlikely anyone will be reassured by this. With internal morale at rock bottom, staff are concerned that the main “outstanding point” is the trust giving up its mission to protect liberal journalism.
Terrestrial television in the UK could be about to take another hit if a rumoured sale of ITV goes ahead. The company’s share price has dropped in recent years, thought to be caused by worries about a tough advertising market since Covid, an ageing audience and the migration of younger viewers to streaming services. In November ITV said it was looking to make additional cost savings of £20m as it managed fallout from last year’s Hollywood writers’ strike.
[See also: Will parliament pass the assisted dying bill?]
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This article appears in the 27 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Optimist’s Dilemma