For the past week, British public life has reverberated with the impact of Elon Musk’s tweets—percussive, repetitive, basically vile—calling for the overthrow of the elected government and weaponizing a national scandal relating to the rape of young girls in impoverished English towns. It’s been hard to keep your head, and not everyone has. The onslaught began on January 1st, when Musk responded to a report by GB News, a right-wing cable-news channel, which said that the country’s Labour government had rejected a national inquiry into non-recent sexual abuse in Oldham, a town just outside Manchester, in northern England. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the actual story is more complicated than that. For years, local politicians in Oldham have been divided about how best to address catastrophic failings among the town’s police and local officials in their handling of rape and abuse cases of girls in the town in the two-thousands and early twenty-tens. (By way of example: in 2012, a social worker named Shabir Ahmed, who worked for Oldham Council for eighteen years, was convicted of thirty child-rape charges and sentenced to twenty-two years’ imprisonment.) The scandal is distressingly familiar. A number of towns and cities across England, including Rochdale, Rotherham, Telford, and Oxford, have experienced comparable episodes, often characterized by the politically charged fact that most of the perpetrators have been men of South Asian descent, with Muslim backgrounds, and that most of the victims have been young white girls.
Last October, a few months after Labour defeated the Conservatives in the country’s general election, councillors in Oldham wrote to the Party’s safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips—a prominent campaigner against violence toward women and girls—asking for a national investigation of what had taken place in the town. Like one of her Conservative predecessors, who had turned down a similar request in 2022, Phillips recommended a locally led process instead. (A recent inquiry along these lines that took place in Telford, a town eighty miles south of Oldham, found more than a thousand cases of child sex exploitation there going back to the seventies; it is considered a model of its type.) Despite acknowledging the “strength of feeling” in Oldham, Phillips wrote that it was for “Oldham Council alone to decide to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally, rather than for the government to intervene.”
A tricky call. Maybe Phillips got it wrong. Maybe she got it right. These aren’t easy, or settled, questions. The interplay of local politics, racial and religious tensions, retrograde attitudes toward women, and, often, terrible prejudice toward the victims themselves has made these cases fiendishly difficult to prosecute and prevent over the years. “This dreadful, life-altering crime has not gone away—in Telford, or elsewhere,” Tom Crowther, a former judge who led the town’s widely praised investigation, wrote in 2022.
But Musk didn’t buy Twitter, now X, for its nuance. “Jess Philips [sic] is a rape genocide apologist,” he posted at 6:40 A.M. Eastern Time on January 3rd, to his two hundred and eleven million followers. Twenty minutes later, he lit into Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, who was the chief prosecutor for England and Wales from 2008 to 2013 and oversaw some of the first successful prosecutions of British Asian “grooming gangs” during his tenure. “Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN,” Musk wrote, in a tweet that, as of this writing, has received fifty-nine million views.
Since then, Musk has tweeted dozens of times on the subject—mostly amplifying anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim tropes, which British right-wing activists have attached to the abuse scandals for many years. Like them, Musk has suggested that a mighty woke coverup has been at work, rather than acknowledging the truth, which is sadder and harder to bear: that these crimes took place in plain sight, that many of the girls—poor, desperately vulnerable, often young teens and even pre-teens—were regarded as sex workers or sluts, rather than children, and that almost no one cared. “Now why would Keir Starmtrooper order his own party to block such an inquiry?” Musk tweeted. “Because he is hiding terrible things. That is why.” Shortly before 8 A.M. on January 8th, Musk updated his pinned tweet to read: “Please call your member of parliament and tell them that the hundreds of thousands of little girls in Britain who were, and are still are, being systematically, horrifically gang-raped deserve some justice in this world.”
It is genuinely hard to find the words to describe the crassness, the ignorance, the potential violence wrapped up in each one of Musk’s interventions. The sudden fixation of the world’s richest man on child sexual exploitation in deindustrialized English towns—much of which took place more than a decade ago—has forced British people like me, who follow the news, who live here, who think they actually care about such things, to check that we are not out of our minds. So we have remembered the voluminous reporting, in all forms—official, journalistic, conspiratorial, dramatized-for-television—that have documented these awful stories for the past fifteen years. We have remembered that reliable data on sexual abuse, particularly toward children, is notoriously hard to compile. (Last November, the Labour government published the first-ever British statistics to include the ethnicity of perpetrators, which showed that seven per cent of offenders in 2023 were “Asian,” roughly in line with their share of the population.) We have remembered that Starmer did a decent job as a public prosecutor. We have remembered that in 2014, Alexis Jay, a Scottish academic and former social worker, led a shocking inquiry, which documented the abuse of some fourteen hundred girls in the town of Rotherham alone. Jay subsequently steered a seven-year national independent inquiry into child sexual abuse—with fifteen strands of investigation—that included interviews with more than seven thousand victims, from all corners of Britain. We have remembered that political will has been lacking. In 2022, Jay’s monumental work made twenty recommendations, none of which were enacted by the previous Conservative government.
But the hard graft of protecting vulnerable children, or prosecuting rapists, or enacting legislative change, is not what Musk is after. “The truth is a concept that Elon Musk clearly has very little interest in,” Andrew Norfolk, a recently retired investigative reporter for the Times of London, who covered the grooming-gang cases for years, told his old newspaper this week. What Musk craves is disorder and proof of his power. Since endorsing Donald Trump’s bid for the Presidency on X, in July, he has stepped up his digital incursions on behalf of right-wing parties and causes in democracies from Argentina to Germany. During last summer’s riots in the U.K., following the deaths, by stabbing, of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class near Liverpool—which were inflamed by online misinformation identifying the alleged killer as a Muslim immigrant (he wasn’t)—Musk tweeted, “Civil war is inevitable.”
At this point, more instructive than anything Musk says, or tweets, is how people and politicians react to his presence. During the past week, Starmer has reverted to quiet, serious prosecutor mode. At a news conference on Monday, which was supposed to be about reforms to the National Health Service, the Prime Minister declined to mention Musk by name. “Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible, they’re not interested in victims,” he told reporters. “They’re interested in themselves.” Phillips, who is no stranger to online abuse, has had to step up her security arrangements since being targeted by Musk’s tweets. “You know, Elon Musk is going to Elon Musk. I’ve got bigger and more important things to be thinking about,” she told Sky News. When Ed Davey, the perfectly inoffensive leader of the Liberal Democrats, the third-largest party in the House of Commons, criticized Musk on X, saying people were fed up with his meddling in British politics, Musk dismissed him as “a snivelling cretin.”
The most unnerving reaction has come from the Conservatives. The Party has been dazzled by Musk for some time. In November, 2023, the former Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, held a fawning “in conversation” event with Musk, in London, where he praised him as a “brilliant innovator and technologist.” Sunak resigned after the Party’s election defeat last summer and has been replaced by Kemi Badenoch, a forty-five-year-old former digital director of The Spectator, Boris Johnson’s old magazine. Badenoch has declined to spell out new policies for her party until 2027, preferring a roving and confrontational style in the meantime. The day after Musk started his latest barrage, Badenoch and the Conservatives decided that there really should be a national public investigation into British Asian grooming gangs—something that she and her party could have done at any point in the past fourteen years. Robert Jenrick, the Conservatives’ shadow Justice Secretary, who was the runner-up to Badenoch in the fall’s leadership contest, lowered the Party’s anti-immigrant rhetoric to Trumpian levels. “Importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women, brought us here,” he wrote on X. Presumably hoping for a retweet, the Party’s shadow Business Secretary, Andrew Griffith, chimed in: “The @elonmusk purchase of X may have saved humanity.”
On Wednesday at noon, in the House of Commons, Badenoch used all six of her questions at Prime Minister’s Questions to pressure Starmer to agree to a new national inquiry into the “rape-gang scandal.” Starmer resisted, pointing out that Jay’s large-scale investigation of sexual abuse in Britain took seven years and its findings had not been implemented. “What is needed now is action on what we already know,” the Prime Minister said. “We already know—myself from personal knowledge when I was chief prosecutor—that warped ideas, myths, and stereotypes about victims are at the heart of this. We have known that for a decade.”
Badenoch ploughed on, “Does he not see that resisting this one means that people will start to worry about a coverup?” Starmer observed, acidly, that this was the first time in her nearly eight years as a Member of Parliament that Badenoch, a former children’s minister, had raised the issue. But context is for the legacy media, and legacy politicians, too, I suppose. Badenoch started to read out the bleak litany of towns affected by these crimes—Telford, Rochdale, Bristol, Derby, Aylesbury, Oldham, Bradford, Peterborough, Coventry, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, and Ramsgate—and the Commons chamber was overwhelmed by shouts of “Shame!” by Labour M.P.s who represent those places and were furious at the Conservative leader for her opportunism. I watched from the press gallery above and, to be honest, I shivered. This was British politics entirely contorted and angry—hyperfocussed, to use a Muskian expression—by the thumbs and antic mind of a very rich man, very far away.
Watching it all, with eyebrows raised, was Nigel Farage. Since last year’s election, Farage has sat as one of five backbench M.P.s for Reform, the latest iteration of the populist, anti-immigrant political movements that he has led for the past twenty years. Farage is on his own roller-coaster journey with Musk. The two met at Mar-a-Lago last month, and there were reports that Musk was willing to donate a hundred million dollars to Reform. But on January 5th, in the midst of another U.K.-facing X bombardment, Musk tweeted that Farage “doesn’t have what it takes” to lead Reform, an apparent reference to Farage’s refusal to associate himself with the case of Tommy Robinson—a jailed far-right founder of the English Defence League, an extremist Islamophobic organization—whom Musk has allowed back onto X. Farage hasn’t seemed too bothered. At Prime Minister’s Questions, he laughed gleefully when Starmer teased him for getting dumped by Musk. Farage shrugged from the backbenches and made an “easy-come-easy-go” kind of gesture. He and his outriders have campaigned on the racial dimension of the grooming-gangs scandal for years. Musk’s hyperfocus and reckless incitement, presumably, will move on and find another target soon. But the anger—and the energy—in British politics is flowing where Farage has always wanted it to go. ♦
