- Elon Musk made a string of bold posts on UK politics, calling for the prime minister to be removed.
- Some UK politicians embraced parts of his campaign, including a renewed focus on a rape-gang scandal.
- Others did not. Few joined the calls to remove PM Keir Starmer, who won an election in July.
Elon Musk on Friday deepened his feud with the government of the UK, calling for Prime Minister Keir Starmer to be removed from office.
The messages continued a trend of increasingly forthright political interventions by Musk, whose attention has moved beyond the US after his endorsement and support of President-elect Donald Trump.
In the past week, Musk has called for the removal of the government of Germany in forthcoming elections, as well as gradually escalating attacks on the UK’s Labour government, which took power in July.
“Starmer must go,” wrote Musk on Friday in a post viewed some 16 million times in less than six hours.
His argument was that Starmer did too little in an earlier role as Britain’s chief prosecutor to combat the organized rape of girls.
The crimes began coming to light in 2002, with prominent cases in the English towns of Rochdale, Oldham, and Huddersfield.
They’ve resulted in scores of convictions, and been the subject of several inquiries, including a 2022 national inquiry.
Some critics of the original investigations have argued that the identity of the perpetrators — many of whom have Pakistani heritage — led to an inadequate response by authorities fearful of being called racist.
Musk’s intervention prompted a mixed response among UK politicians. Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, said she agreed with Musk that there should be a formal inquiry into the issue, with a wider scope than the 2022 inquiry.
Reform UK, a smaller right-wing party led by Nigel Fararge, had already called for an inquiry as well. Musk has previously endorsed the party.
While the systemic rapes have been a part of public discourse for years, they were not an animating issue in the 2024 election, which Starmer’s Labour Party won by a landslide.
UK politicians have generally not followed Musk in arguing that Starmer is unsuitable for office because of his role in leading prosecutions during his tenure from 2008 to 2013.
Starmer told The Times of London in 2012 that victims of grooming gangs had faced a “lack of understanding” and said he would order a restructuring of the way such cases are treated.
Wes Streeting, a Labour MP and member of Starmer’s cabinet, pushed back at Musk’s claims in a BBC interview on Friday.
“Some of the criticisms Elon Musk has made I think are misjudged and certainly misinformed,” he said.
“But we’re willing to work with Elon Musk who I think has got a big role to play with his social media platform to help us and other countries tackle these serious issues.”
Alicia Kears, a member of Badenoch’s top team, told the BBC that Musk had “fallen prone” to sharing things on his X platform “without critically assessing them.”
Bloomberg reported that UK right-wing politicians had privately contacted Trump’s circle to warn against joining Musk in his support for Tommy Robinson, an imprisoned right-wing activist whom Musk has championed in his recent flurry of tweets.
