Where is the British Outrage about Elon?

Fleet Street is uncharacteristically silent

It’s only the beginning of January and already it feels like we have descended into bewildering pre-inauguration insanity.

All I can think as I can scan the news is: Why?

Why is Elon Musk, a man who you’d think had enough to occupy him on these shores, disrupting British politics over something hideous - gangs of men, many of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Afghan origin, who groomed under-age (mostly white) girls for sex - in the UK - over ten years ago? Yes, kudos to him for stirring up debate around the horrors of what happened and the lack of accountability for it, partly on account of lawmakers and enforcers worried about the ethnicity of the perpetrators; he has gotten me spending a few hours both online and on the phone to London, trying to educate myself about the history of Britain’s evil rape gangs.

But it seems as if there was a meaningful inquiry into the abuse and the cover-up. The problem was that the Conservative government, under whose watch this happened, didn’t implement the Inquiry’s list of recommendations, so it’s imperative that the current Labour government now does.

But after just a few hours of digging, I do not feel qualified to say whether there now needs to be a further national inquiry into what happened - or just a local one. And that’s the debate Musk has riled up, accusing the current Prime Minister Keir Starmer and a Labour MP Jess Phillips of blocking a national investigation for self-serving reasons. (Keir Starmer was the head of the Crown Prosecution Service at the time all the horrific abuse came to light).

But I do feel qualified to ask: why is the normally fizzy British press so non-critical of Musk’s brazen intervention in their national domestic policy?

It’s bizarre.

In the right-leaning Telegraph there are plenty of news stories, but no opinion pieces addressing the question of whether or not a complete outsider should be controlling the British national agenda. The Times has published an editorial calling for a national inquiry (which is what Musk wants). The Guardian’s columnist Marina Hyde has simply shrugged that we are in Musk’s world now. And the Mail has focused on the fact he now wants to buy a British football team.

The British press is famously not pusillanimous. So, what is going on?

Is it that, in this instance, Musk is doing their job? Namely attacking their leadership and therefore they don’t want to speak up?

Or are they afraid of being cancelled on X? (Reportedly, a journalist for the British Spectator has been cancelled and it’s not clear if Musk is behind it.)

If so….what does that say about Musk and his push for “Free Speech”?

Further, why did Musk turn suddenly on Trump’s best British buddy, Reform party leader Nigel Farage, when just weeks ago he’d allegedly offered to donate $100 million? (Yes, I know Farage had refused to call for the release of far-right activist Tommy Robinson from prison - because, as he pointed out, Robinson is an extremist and a career criminal.) But then, per Farage, on LBC, Musk did a U-turn and started re-tweeting Farage with “positive messages.”

Farage on LBC

“So, I don’t know,” shrugged Farage.

Neither do I. It’s all pretty weird.

One of my sources, who has met Musk several times, gave me an explanation that feels right if you read Elon’s Twitter feed: “Elon thinks he’s very funny,” explained this person. “And he surrounds himself with ‘friends’ - who are not really his friends - who laugh at his ‘jokes’, so there’s no one to tell him if he’s not funny at all.”

And someone else I trust - my dad, actually - points out that the countries whose leadership Elon’s been busy criticizing recently - the UK, Germany, Norway - all have fiscal and/or regulatory policies in place that are not exactly helpful to Elon’s bottom line.

(On this, my dad is extremely sympathetic to Elon. My dad is not a fan of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer to put it mildly. In fact, he’s so unhappy with Britain’s current leadership he can barely discuss anything else. It got to the point over Christmas where I suggested every time he wanted to say something negative about the Labour Government he write it down instead so we didn’t all have to suffer through the doom and gloom encompassing his brain. “Maybe you could write a satire, even?” I said hopefully. “It would be more fun to read.”)

But even my dad thinks Elon is wrong to blame Keir Starmer for mishandling the rape gangs. So that tells me something.

I preferred it when Elon was tooling around the Mar-a-Lago golf course in Trump’s golf cart, or seen running into the capitol, his son X slung across his shoulders like the new must-have accessory. It all felt slightly more harmless.

Musk at the capitol, with son, X Æ A-12, in tow

A little gossip for you: I am told by a very well-placed source that minutes after the photo-op, caught as Musk entered the Capitol, that little X went “missing” for two hours.

It’s a good thing no one called Child Protective Services…

And if the British media had found out about that, one hopes they would have covered it with customary gusto, and less of this week’s reticence.